"Tonal" Dodecaphony and Sentential Form: Extracts from Humphrey Searle's Symphony No. 2, Op. 33

Abstract

In an article written for The Musical Times in 1940, the English composer Humphrey Searle suggested the possibility of there being a "tonal center" in twelve-tone music. This vignette attempts to put analytical flesh on the bones of his argument. Using extracts from his Symphony No. 2, Op. 33, I demonstrate how movement from relative consonance to dissonance and back (effected by means of pitch class–set expansion, shifts of macroharmony, and/or functionally suggestive row-area transpositions) can serve both to generate and to resolve structural tension. This tendency is strengthened by traditional neighbor-note rhetoric (reminiscent of smooth nineteenth-century voice-leading transformations) and careful orchestration, as well as the second extract's use of a Classical formal type: an antecedent + continuation phrase hybrid theme.