Le 28 juin 2017
de 14h30 à 15h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 5
Séance - The Second Viennese School (I): Berg, Organicism, and the Teleology of Form
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Daniel Moreira
How one should understand pitch in the music Schoenberg, Berg and Webern composed in the so-called ‘free atonal’ period is still quite controversial. From the 1950s and 60s, strictly atonal readings based on pitch-class set-theory (Forte, 1973) have become the dominant approach, but they have been criticized for analyzing pitch in non-hierarchical terms and ignoring remnants from common practice tonality.
Recognizing the shortcomings of such an approach to the repertoire under consideration, I follow Lerdahl (2001) and Newton (2014) in claiming that ‘theories of tonality and atonality should … be linked’ and hence a more nuanced approach is required — one that while recognizing the revolutionary significance of that music still acknowledges the extent to which it contains ‘a puzzling amount of old [tonal] material in unfamiliar contexts’ (Christensen, 1987).
I thus propose an analytical method for early post-tonal music which follows Lerdahl (2001) in arguing that in the absence of conventional tonal syntax the relative salience of (contextually emphasized) pitches becomes a major determinant of perceived pitch structure. Unlike Lerdahl, however, I state that reiterated emphasis of specific pitch-classes allows such pitch-classes to gradually become (increasingly stable, almost tonal-like) goals of motion. I thus recover Kramer’s (1988) notion that in early atonal repertoire a sense of progression remains crucial in the listener’s experience of the temporal unfolding of musical events.
To show how my method works, I focus in Schoenberg’s Op. 11/1 and Berg’s Op. 5/1, proving a new understanding for the final chord of each of the two compositions.
