Cyclic pitch organization in the twelve-tone works of Aaron Copland
Item
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Title
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Cyclic pitch organization in the twelve-tone works of Aaron Copland
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:9a03680656c6:11602
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identifier
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12190
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Creator
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Behrens, Lisa S.,
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Contributor
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Joseph N. Straus
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Music | Copland | Cyclic | Pitch | Twelve-Tone
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Abstract
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Late in his career, Aaron Copland composed four twelve-tone works; the Quartet for Piano and Strings (1950), the Piano Fantasy (1957), Connotations (1962), and Inscape (1967). Rather than constituting a sudden conversion to serial composition, Copland's mature twelve-tone works constitute a revival of serial procedures that antedates and pervades his American works of the 1930s and 40s. Consequently, in this dissertation I will assert a stylistic continuity that informs the mature twelve-tone works, which also distinguishes Copland's tonal idiom. This continuity contradicts the distinction between Copland's "severe" and "simple," or "highbrow" and "lowbrow" styles, which has been previously promoted in the literature. Accordingly, I will show that Copland adapted twelve-tone principles to his already well-established idiom, transferring salient features of the harmonic language in his American works to a serial platform. As a result, all of the mature twelve-tone works employ cyclic row classes that are based on whole-tone relationships. The cyclic properties of those row classes generate a plethora of symmetrical constructs that recreate the distinctive fourth-and-fifth-harmonies that are typical of Copland's tonal harmonic language. There are four additional compositional principles that determine the organization of pitch: segmental invariance, whole-tone complementation, cyclic formal articulation, and a generalized collectional interaction between pentatonic, octatonic, and hexatonic sets.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Music
