Topic: "Twelve-Toneness: How Russian Music Theory Can Help Us Better Understand Twelve-Tone Technique”
Christopher Segall, Associate Professor of Music Theory at the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati
Room 130, Edward Johnson Building at 80 Queen's Park
Event is free and open to the public, and is followed by a casual reception.
Abstract:
Twelve-tone technique tends to be described in rigid, orthodox terms that best characterize the music of the Second Viennese School—a single tone row, transformed by transposition and inversion, generates all the pitch material of a work. This view enshrines Schoenberg as a central figure of compositional history, but it does little justice to the wide variety of creative approaches found in the twentieth century. An alternative, expanded idea of twelve-tone technique comes from Russian music theory. Yuri Kholopov’s “twelve-toneness” (dvenadtsatitonovost’) considers strict dodecaphony as just one manifestation of a larger, more pervasive trend of deploying the twelve tones of the chromatic scale in an intentional, patterned way, encompassing a range of practices that both predate and extend far beyond Schoenberg. Emerging from a cultural environment that prohibited the study and composition of serial music until the 1960s, twelve-toneness serves as a foil for Anglo-American historiography and its indebtedness to Schoenberg’s proponents. The music of Alfred Schnittke (1934–98) offers an enticing case study. As a “young composer” of the sixties (shestidesyatnik), Schnittke belonged to the first Soviet generation to experiment with serialism. Known to have rejected it by the 1970s in favor of a representational, “polystylistic” language, Schnittke nonetheless continued to draw upon twelve-tone rows for the duration of his career. I’ll explore twelve-tone technique in two works, the String Quartet No. 3 (1983) and the Viola Concerto (1985), that would not typically be considered twelve-tone. Tone rows are not used comprehensively and exclusively, but are rather found alongside other techniques. Twelve-toneness allows us to recognize that twelve-tone technique persists throughout the twentieth century to a much greater extent than the rigid, orthodox view suggests.