Lyric Suite Research Articles

Нарратив и нарративность в «Лирической сюите» Альбана Берга

The article is devoted to Alban Berg’s "Lyric Suite", which has been the object of hermeneutical analysis for half a century as a classic example of instrumental music with a hidden program. "The narrative turn" in musicology in recent years has brought to life another interpretation of this work, aimed at revealing the principles of narrative in it. This becomes the task of this article. The arsenal of sources accumulated to date allows us to interpret the Suite as a system of subtexts, not only musical, but also verbal. The narrative structure includes: the author (he is also the hero), characters, plot, several explicit and hidden addressees, events happening in a certain place and at a certain time, a clearly expressed author’s point of view, which is revealed by quoting from three works about love: "Lyric Symphony" by A. Zemlinsky, "Tristan and Isolde" by R. Wagner and "De profundis clamavi" by Ch. Baudelaire. A love story that does not have a happy ending unfolds in several planes: real, mystical and mythological. Expanding the concept of narrativity, it is possible to point out other narrative properties of aesthetic and compositional-technical kind in the Suite: a romantic narrative associated with the relationship of words and music; the narrative of cinema, referring to the present; the narrative of dodecaphony as an individual interpretation of A. Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method of composition.

Zur Poetik und Interpretation des offenen Schlusses

This article reviews the long historical process and changing significance of open endings in music from Haydn's mid-period symphonies of the 1760s to Helmut Lachenmann. Taking two case studies by Alban Berg (Lyric Suite, Wozzeck) as its starting point, the article demonstrates that open endings are often linked to ideas of cyclicity and the permanence of "objective time" as well as to a critique of social or political situations. Therefore, open endings challenge the aesthetic difference between the musical art-work and everyday experience, a tendency, that can be traced back to the emergence of self-reflexivity in early 19th-century music and aesthetics and even to Haydn's earlier listener-responsive musical writing. In later 19th-century and early 20th-century music, large-scale forms increasingly posed the problem of an inability to achieve closure. Further key examples elaborate the tendency of open endings toward musical self-reflexivity and the appearance of the composer-persona at the end of a cyclic work: Schubert's Der Leiermann from Winterreise, Schumann's Der Dichter spricht from Kinderszenen, Schoenberg's concluding piece from Six little Piano Pieces op. 19 as well as Lachenmann's "music with images" The Little Match-Girl. Finally, Schumann's and Schönberg's closing pieces are considered from the perspective of performance history and analysis, highlighting th performer's substantial impact on creating (or limiting) the impression of "openness".

Two Orchestral Embodiments of Three Pieces from op. 54 by Edvard Grieg

Lyric Suite is an orchestral version of four movements from Grieg’s Lyric Pieces V, op. 54. Three out of these four movements exist in two orchestral versions. The aim of the current research is to highlight peculiar traits of Grieg’s orchestral style in the late period of composer’s life by comparing scores of two orchestrators.

“… then grant me release!” – Scordaturas and its Semantics in the Music of Alban Berg

There are three types of scordaturas for stringed instruments (violins, guitar, harp, and piano): downward, upward, and diffuse. The more practically motivated cases of scordatura in Alban Berg’s works are irrelevant. Scordaturas with semantic function can be found in Wozzeck and the Lyric Suite . The downward scordatura signifies decay, death, and dying and is grounded in the idea of “release,” as evidenced in the Bach choral “It is enough.” The upward scordatura means madness and is motivated by the idea of “over-stretching,” which includes the potential breaking of a string. Diffuse scordatura is connected to the “destruction” of a social order; it can be seen in the tavern scene in Wozzeck where the piano is supposed to sound out of tune.

Aaron Copland: Music in the 20's (review)

Aaron Copland: Music in the 20's. DVD. Directed by David M. Davis. West Long Branch, NJ: Kultur, 2011, 1964. D4760. $69.99. In 1965, National Educational Television-a precursor of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)-produced a 12-part series entitled Aaron Copland: Music in the 20's. It is essentially a music appreciation course taught by the so-called Dean of American Composers on Western art music of the 1920s. The 3 DVD release of this six-hour program was made possible by a grant from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, but the retail price remains quite high ($69.99). In the introductory episode, Copland argues that the 1920s was a significant decade for Western art music because: (1) there was an extraordinary desire to be groundbreaking and original, and (2) recent developments in Western art music can be traced to innovations that originated in the '20s. In the next seven episodes, Copland argues that most major composers of the 1920s responded to the Stravinsky/ Schoenberg (tonal/atonal, non-German/ German) dichotomy that had emerged in the early 1910s. In these lectures, he proceeds geographically from Paris (Poulenc, Honegger, Milhaud, Stravinsky, de Falla) to Germany/Austria (Berg, Webern, Weill, Hindemith), and from Eastern Europe (Bartok) to the Americas (Villa-Lobos, Copland). The last four episodes examine composers who seem less affected by this dichotomy, with an emphasis on those associated with the American maverick tradition (Hindemith, Prokofiev, Harris, Thomson, Ives, Ruggles, Ornstein, Cowell, Varese). The most valuable feature of this series is the performances on every episode. High - lights include Bethany Beardslee's rendition of Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire, Paul Jacobs's performance of Honegger's Piano Concertino, the Juilliard String Quartet's interpretation of Berg's Lyric Suite, David Tudor's presentation of Cowell piano works, and a full production of Hinde - mith's Hin und Zuruck starring Beverly Sills. Also worth noting is the fact that each performance occurs on a set that is specifically designed to match the work that is being played. Copland's commentary about the music is geared towards the general public, and does not assume the ability to read music or knowledge of technical terms. He generally begins each episode by providing an overview of a geographic area or concept, and goes to discuss a composer's background and then deliver a brief program note before the work is played. …

Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs: The Story of a Love in Letters. By Constantin Floros. Trans. by Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch.

Constantin Floros's edition of Alban Berg's correspondence with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin—the ‘muse’ who inspired his Lyric Suite—and her husband Herbert, a Prague industrialist, was originally published in 1995 as the fiftieth anniversary issue of the Österreichische Musikzeitschrift (Alban Berg und Hanna Fuchs. Briefe und Studien, Erstveröffentlichungen (Vienna, 1995)). A revised and expanded edition was published in 2001 by Arche Verlag, Zürich and Hamburg (Alban Berg und Hanna Fuchs. Die Geschichte einer Liebe in Briefen, henceforth Geschichte). This incorporated a new chapter on Der Wein replacing the brief note in the 1995 edition but omitted Walburga Litschauer's essay on Berg's juvenile poem ‘Hanna’—of interest to a student of Berg's early life but not strictly relevant to the later love affair. An appendix contained two letters from Adorno to Helene Berg dating from 1936, both of which originally appeared in Henri Lonitz's edition of the Adorno–Berg correspondence (Theodor W. Adorno/Alban Berg: Briefwechsel 1925–1935 (Frankfurt, 1997), 329–39). The present volume is essentially a translation of that edition. However, there are some revisions and expansions, notably in the introduction, which has been doubled in length to include more general remarks about Berg and his oeuvre.

Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs: The Story of a Love in Letters (review)

Reviewed by: Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs: The Story of a Love in Letters Bryan R. Simms Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs: The Story of a Love in Letters. By Constantin Floros. Translated by Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. [xx, 145p. ISBN-13: 9780253349668. $24.95.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographic references, index. Constantin Floros's Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs is an installment in the still growing literature on Berg's affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin and the incorporation of its details into his music, especially the Lyric Suite. Information about the affair began to appear in print in 1977, and it is now the subject of more than twenty books and articles, a BBC documentary, and at least two novels. Briefly, here's what happened. In mid-May 1925 Berg visited Prague for a festival of modern music at which his Wozzeck Fragments were to be performed, and he accepted an invitation [End Page 507] from Herbert Fuchs-Robettin—brother-in-law of his friend Franz Werfel—to stay with him and his family in the Prague suburb of Bubenec.. Berg was in high spirits during the festival: his music was enjoying success as never before, and just as he arrived he learned from the conductor Erich Kleiber that Wozzeck would definitely receive its premier performance at the Berlin Staatsoper in the near future. "My brain is on fire," he wrote to his wife, Helene. Berg was especially charmed by the Fuchs-Robettins' two children and fascinated by their luxurious life style. "My hosts spoil me," Berg wrote to Helene on the day after he arrived. "Room with hot water, glorious view, Roger Galet soap, Venetian blinds so that you can sleep with the windows open at night" (Alban Berg, Letters to his Wife [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1971], 337). In his letters to Helene, Berg did not, of course, mention the principal attraction during his stay—Fuchs-Robettin's wife, Hanna, who was pretty, at thirty some ten years younger than her husband or Berg, and known as something of a flirt. Soma Morgenstern described her as a "scharfe Dame," and Adorno summed her up as an opportunist, "a bourgeoise through and through, who was once touched by the possibility of being other, without ever being able to realize that possibility" (p. 128). Judging from Berg's later correspondence with Hanna—all that is known is given in this book for the first time in English—the flirting between the two got heavier during his weeklong stay, leading in all likelihood to a sexual encounter, ("that blissful half hour," as Berg described it), probably on the morning of 20 May. After the festival, the composer returned to Vienna to finish the Chamber Concerto, prepare for the Wozzeck premiere, and take on new compositional challenges. The correspondence that passed between Berg and the Fuchs-Robbetins after the incident in Prague is the centerpiece of this short book by Constantin Floros. Thirteen of the items are passionate and rambling letters that Berg wrote privately to Hanna between June 1925 and December 1934. They are filled with rapturous professions of love, hopelessness and despair, and some contain information about Berg's enshrinement of the affair in his music. These letters, which were acquired in 1992 by the Austrian National Library, plus thirteen additional pieces of correspondence between Berg and the Fuchs-Robettins, first appeared in the Österreichische Musikzeitschrift (50 [special issue, 1995]: 30–71), edited by Floros. They were republished in 2001 in Floros's Alban Berg und Hanna Fuchs: Die Geschichte einer Liebe in Briefen (Zürich: Arche, 2001) where Floros added a concise historical background and interpretation of the relevance of the letters to the Lyric Suite and aria Der Wein. This is the work that is given here in an excellent and careful English translation by Ernest Bernhardt Kabisch. Few readers in the present day will find Berg's adventure in Prague in May 1925 to be all that unusual. How many composers facing middle age have had affairs with younger women, often leading to a renewed level of productivity? On the surface, at least, Berg's affair is not that different from...

The Lyric Suite and Berg's Twelve-Tone Duality

Abstract The Lyric Suite is Berg's first extended twelve-tone composition, yet by his own description only half of the work uses twelve-tone techniques. This compositional hybridity raises significant aesthetic and political questions. How could the composer demonstrate what he called “the possibility of expressing myself musically in that way” and at the same time artfully prevaricate on the issue of twelve-tone necessity? When in its genesis did the composer understand the Lyric Suite to be a hybrid composition? Here the sketches and autographs—held by the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna—prove invaluable. Berg's sketches reveal that he began the Lyric Suite by working around the twelve-tone movements, which started with minimal experimental work that he did not keep. Berg attempted some kind of “twelve-tone music” with the Lyric Suite, but in failing to differentiate the compositional process from the supposedly pre-compositional, his approach was inconsistent with Schoenberg's early method of “working with tones.” At the same time, Schoenberg's and Webern's twelve-tone compositions from the early 1920s display hybrid aspects of their own. Berg came last of the three to twelve-tone methods and devised a typically artful response, going public with his amalgam and exhibiting it in the very fabric and design of his composition.

Perle's Cyclic Sets and Klumpenhouwer Networks: A Response

Each of the papers in this issue addresses how elements of George Perle’s compositional system and analytical methodology intersect with features of Klumpenhouwer networks (K-nets), drawing on Perle’s own communication on the subject as well as his writings.1 This commentary is intended both to clarify Perle’s position and to provide additional context from his writings. Lewin and Lambert directly refer to Perle’s materials. Lewin compares K-nets and “Perle cycles” (Perle calls them cyclic sets) as models for compositional events, and Lambert describes his K-net families in terms of Perle’s cyclic sets.2 Perle was initially in uenced by Berg’s Lyric Suite, where the row is comprised of two interlocking inversionally-related interval5 or -7 cycles and thus is comprised of adjacent dyads from two sums, 9 and 4, as shown in Example 1, where sums of 9 are bracketed on top, and those of 4 on bottom. Perle calls such a construct a “cyclic set.” A cyclic set is identiŽ ed by its interval cycles and its sums; the cyclic interval is the difference of the sums (9– 4 = 5 or 4–9 = 7; either 5 or 7 may be used). Each imbricated trichord in the set is comprised of a middle “axis note” with surrounding “neighbor notes.” The trichord is the smallest unit that can identify a cyclic set, as it contains the two sums and the cyclic interval. In K-net terms, these trichords are all related by strong isography, with the same conŽ guration of Ts and Is.3 For instance, {8,1,3}, {6,A,B} and {4,0,9} can all be interpreted as T5/7, I9/I4 K-nets. The given row-form of P5 (rows in Example 1 are rotated by one hexachord to create continuous cyclic sets) shares one sum with related forms at sum 9 (row-form I4), and sum 4 (row-form IB). These three rows vertically create the same group of K-nets related by strong isography when aligned. Cyclic sets that share one sum, such as the sums-9/2 and -9/4 sets, are called “cognate sets” by Perle. Cyclic sets are part of a “cyclic set complex” that includes all alignments of the two interlocking interval cycles. Example 2(a) reproduces Lewin’s Example 1.1, with T1 and TB cycles in an offset alignment and sums 6,7 found on the diagonals. In later examples, Lewin maintains this offset arrangement, showing trichords as triangles between the two sets, and does not represent them in one line, as Perle does in his cyclic sets. This example is rewritten as a cyclic set of sums 6/7 in Example 2(b). It is placed within a cyclic set complex, where the sets are based on interval cycles 1/B. The interval-B cycle in boldface shifts one to the right in 1See the citation list for pertinent material. 2Lewin writes that Perle suggests that K-nets “can best be viewed” in terms of cycles, but Perle only notes that they “may be deŽ ned and efŽ ciently and economically represented in this way.” Perle 1993, 300. 3Tracing this type of row would open a twelve-tone component to K-nets.

Pages: New Poems and Cuttings

John Matthias. Pages: New Poems and Cuttings. Athens, OH: Swallow, 2000. John Matthias once told a newspaper reporter that is ultimately important to write about something more significant than the self.... [otherwise] we begin to get poems at the level of the television talk show. A look through almost any popular contemporary literary journal or anthology proves Matthias all-too-right in claiming that American poetry has mired itself in the narrow world of workshop confessionalism, a world not far removed from talk show exhibitionism. But how to avoid this problem? How to cure poetry of self-obsession? Language poetry has offered path out of the swamp of confessionalism, but John Matthias has, in the thirty years since his first collection Bucyrus, been following another. Finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything. So wrote Ernest Hemingway, famously in A Farewell to Arms. His sentences point toward the path John Matthias (coincidentally also a midwestern Europhile) has been following. Matthias's new collection Pages: New Poems and Cuttings is his first since 1995, when Swallow Press published Swimming at Midnight and Beltane at Aphelion, his collected poems in volumes. In Pages, as in his earlier work, Matthias makes names, dates, and numbers the backbone of his poetics. In his hands, proper names, specific dates, and significant numbers become the means to write away from the self, to travel through history, geography, and intertextuality. The first of the book's three harts consists of a prouD of short poems. as well as translations from the Serbian, Swedish, and French (translation has always been of Matthias's means of escape from the self, a way of importing new voices and energies into his poetry). In these short poems Matthias invokes the powerful aura of names, places, dates, and numbers, and revisits some of his habitual concerns: music, elegy, violence, and history. The names of the poems alone show the power of Matthias's attraction to the kind of language Hemingway praised. Even a few suffice: Two in New York;Easter 1912 and Christmas 1929,Two in Harar,The Lyric Suite: Aldeburgh Festival, Snape. Doubles and diptychs abound in these poems, allowing Matthias to draw connections between apparently discrete characters and phenomena. Two in Harar,for example, uses geographic coincidence to contrast the explorer and orientalist Sir Richard Burton with Rimbaud. The appear as figures of the artist (or man of aesthetic play) and the man of violence and realpolitik-a fundamental contrast in the poetry of Matthias, who once imagined himself with Prospero over shoulder and Lenin over the other. The unexpected turn here is that it is Burton who emerges as the artist or player, and the later Rimbaud, fallen away from art, as the bloodyhanded realpolitiker. Matthias has never been a poet for obvious conclusions. Place is used, in a number of the short poems, as a means of drawing together different characters and histories. Six or So in Petersburg, for example, reads like a Who's Who of Russian politics and culture. And in Sadnesses: Black Seas, the coincidence of place allows Matthias to intertwine the lives of Ovid, Eisenstein, and Pushkin: the horses of old Helios stumble in their course the sea's aflame the plow of earth cleaves heaven: General Insov was a loyal friend but what to do with this new Governor Vorontsov good Qvidius except go fuck his wife: the field of honor is as boring as the gaming board... The technique here is essentially a modernist one, in which or more times (evoked through dates and proper names) are experienced as one. It is as though we could place different epistemes over the other, like transparencies on a overhead projector. Hugh Kenner, seeing this technique in Pound's early poems, said that in them two times have become as one and that now lay flat, transparent upon not-now. …

Style and Idea in the Lyric Suite of Alban Berg

Review Article| October 01 1999 Style and Idea in the Lyric Suite of Alban Berg Style and Idea in the Lyric Suite of Alban Berg by George Perle Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1995 68 pp. Dave Headlam Dave Headlam Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Music Theory (1999) 43 (2): 349–358. https://doi.org/10.2307/3090665 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Dave Headlam; Style and Idea in the Lyric Suite of Alban Berg. Journal of Music Theory 1 October 1999; 43 (2): 349–358. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3090665 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsJournal of Music Theory Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. 1999 © Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 065201999 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Style and Idea in the Lyric Suite of Alban Berg

This new edition of a monograph on Alban Berg's Lyric Suite has been expanded to include a new chapter on the non-serial aspects of the work, musicologist Perle's earlier writings, a comparative study of the sketches and drafts, and new analytical observations and material on the Kolisch Quartet's h

Reference and Association in the Vier Lieder, Op. 2, of Alban Berg

While scholars have focused considerable attention on extramusical references and associations in certain works of Alban Berg (especially the Lyric Suite, Chamber Concerto, Wozzeck, and the Violin Concerto), little attention has been given to these kinds of procedures in Berg's early Vier Lieder, op. 2. Referential associations in the op. 2 songs originate from the composer's relationship with Helene Nahowsky, whose affections he was courting during the time of their composition (1908–10). The references involve the key of D minor (“Helene's key”), an acronym based on the couple's initials (A B H = A B♭ B♭), and quotations and parody alluding to passages from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

The Cambridge companion to Berg

Chronology Introduction Part I. Culture and Environment: 1. Defining home: Berg's life on the periphery Christopher Hailey 2. Battles of the mind: Berg and the cultural politics of 'Vienna 1900' Andrew Barker 3. Berg and Adorno Raymond Geuss Part II. From Song to Opera: 4. Early works: tonality and beyond Anthony Pople 5. Berg's aphoristic pieces Kathryn Bailey 6. Berg, Mahler and the Three Orchestral Pieces, Op.6 Derrick Puffett 7. The musical language of Wozzeck Anthony Pople Part III. After Wozzeck: 8. Secret programmes Douglas Jarman 9. Compositional process in Wozzeck and Lulu: a glimpse of Berg's atonal method Patricia Hall 10. Compositional technique 1923-6: the Chamber Concerto and the Lyric Suite Neil Boynton 11. In the orbit of Lulu: the late works Anthony Pople 12. Lulu's feminine performance Judy Lochhead Part IV. Postscript: Berg and the twentieth century Arnold Whittall.

Of Modell-Typen and Modell-Typen: Berg, Schoenberg, F. H. Klein, and the Concept of Row Derivation

With the assistance of sources from the Berg Nachlaß at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, this study readdresses a practice cited by those declaring Berg's twelve-tone techniques peripheral to a history of modernism: his use of more than one twelve-tone row in a composition. This technique, vital to Berg's work but proscribed by Schoenberg and the unity so often idealized in Schoenberg's writings, is found to have originated with the composer and theorist Fritz Heinrich Klein (1892-1977). Documentary evidence indicates that Klein's op. 14 Variationen proved especially significant as Berg developed a personal epistemology of twelve-tone music. Examination of Berg's debt to Klein illuminates the large-scale structure of Berg's Lyric Suite, impels exploration of the correlations that allow one to speak of an organic relationship between "row forms," and encourages clarification of Schoenberg's, Berg's, and Hauer's historical relevance to the origins of dodecaphony.

Selections from Robert Motherwell's "Lyric Suite"

Selections from Robert Motherwell's "Lyric Suite"

Alban Berg, master of the smallest link

Translators' introduction A note on the translation Preface Tone Reminiscence The works Analysis and Berg Piano sonata Seven Early Songs First String Quartet The Altenberg Songs Clarinet pieces Orchestral pieces Towards a characterisation of Wozzeck Epilogomena to the Chamber Concerto Lyric Suite Der Wein Experiences with Lulu About the text Afterword Adorno's principal writings on Berg Index.

“What Happened to Ravel’s Bolero?”: Weinzweig’s Serialism

WHAT HAPPENED TO RAVEL’S BOLERO?” : WEINZWEIG’S SERIALISM S.R . M A C G IL L IV R A Y A N D N O R EE N IVAN CIC Lakehead University I f all art constantly aspires to the condition of music, as Pater assures us is the case (140), it is somewhat surprising that there have not been more discussions of the structural relationships between musical compositions and works of literature. E.K. Brown’s examination of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Helen Gardner’s of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets are two notable exceptions that help to prove the rule. In Canadian studies particularly there has been a dearth of such enquiries. The point is not made with reference to works that have a musician as hero or heroine, such as Robertson Davies’s A Mixture of Frailties, or to works that may include pieces of actual music, such as William Kirby’s The Golden Dog, or to works of literature, usually poetry, that have been given musical settings,1 but rather with reference to those works of literature the structure of which can be profitably examined in musical terms, not just to prove the correctness of Pater’s assertion, but in order to discover new means by which to appreciate the literature and the artistry of the writer willing to challenge conventional modes of expression. Two examinations of some of D.C. Scott’s poetry published in recent years (Roberts; Kilpatrick) indicate a number of the rewards to be derived from such an approach. But these studies also suggest that a good deal more can be done, not only with Scott, himself a noted amateur musician, but also with other writers who have had training in music (among Canadian writers E.J. Pratt, Earle Birney, and Robert Finch come immediately to mind), or whose writing gives clear evidence of a musical influence. Such a writer is Helen Weinzweig, author of two novels, Passing Ceremony (1973) and Basic Black with Pearls (1980), and a number of short stories, most of which have appeared in the recently published A View from the Roof (1989). She has been married since 1940 (Such 15) to John Weinzweig, the man called by the Toronto Star “the Dean of Canadian Composers” (Littler G3), for whom she has been a patient, sympathetic, supportive, but not exclusively uncritical listener (Such 18). The close relationship, both personal and artistic, has had an almost in­ evitable effect, to the good, as it turns out, for Weinzweig’s career as a professional writer. “I don’t understand myself how I started writing in a manner that turned out to be professional from the beginning,” she told inEnglish Stu d ies in Ca n a d a , x v ii, 2 , June 19 9 1 terviewer Nancy Bauer. “My husband is a composer, and in being part of his career, I did do lots of absorbing of the creative process by osmosis” (Bauer 12; Such 18). The point here, however, is not whatever effect her composer husband’s work has had on the astonishing maturity of Weinzweig’s prose (even from the first published story there is virtually nothing that can be pointed out to as ‘prentice work), but rather the shaping effect that John Weinzweig’s interest in experimental composition has had in sparking her own interest in the composition of some of her own work. Since 1938 John Weinzweig has been vitally interested in Arnold Schoen­ berg’s twelve-tone technique and the variations that can be worked on it. Twelve-tone’s abandonment of the classic diatonic scale seemed to offer free­ dom from a stale and outmoded conventionality and to provide the means to an expressiveness of mood needed by a modern composer writing for a mod­ ern age and its audience. “I listened to a recording of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite in the music library of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where I w eis taking my Meister’s degree,” John Weinzweig told an interviewer, “. . .and. . .1 heard music that w eis essentially very dramatic and highly expressive. I was so moved...

Reflections on the First Movement of Berg's Lyric Suite

The compositional technique displayed in Berg's Lyric Suite is at once superficially and profoundly related to the implications of the diatonic system. On a somewhat superficial level compositional aspects associated with the diatonic system pervade the work: the entire composition is cast in the form of a suite, individual movements display formal structures borrowed from diatonic music,1 traditional contrapuntal techniques are employed,2 and the vertical sonorities frequently bear a close resemblance to those of the tonal system.3 More significant implications of the diatonic system are to be seen in Berg's criteria of thematic equation. Just as composers of past centuries frequently depended more on rhythm and melodic contour than on exact pitch duplication to achieve thematic identity,4 so Berg uses similar rhythms and melodies, even though the intervallic content may be altered, to create relationships with previous material. This is clearly demonstrated in the analogous canonic sections of the first and second parts of the Allegretto (mm. 7-11 and 44-47) (see Perle 1972:6263). In the first section the canonic theme comprises pitches 8-11 and 0-7 of the row, while in the second section the canonic episode is recapitulated using pitches 1-11 of the retrograde inversion form (Ex. 1). The basic contour of the themes is similar, however, as is the rhythmic content. This rhythmic content of the canonic themes is not original with the first statement, but is an almost direct restatement of the rhythmic format in which the row is first stated in measures 2-4 by the first violin (Ex. 2a). In fact, only a slight rhythmic difference obtains; the later canonic theme (Ex. 1, mm. 44-46), is in fact rhythmically identical to the original row exposition. Thus the canonic themes are themselves a direct development of the material in measures 2-4. That is, thematic equation is achieved with the original row statement through the retention of rhythmic content (and melodic contour), and development occurs due to the new relationship of the rhythm to pitch and interval content in each case.5 The thematic importance of rhythm may also be seen in measures 36 and 37 (Ex. 2). These measures are structurally significant in that they articulate the midpoint of this binary movement, referring back to the opening material in the first violin, measures 2-4. Here, however, the rhythmic and melodic contents of these opening measures are separated and a new kind of phase shift is made, in which the original rhythm and original melody are stated in another relationship and in two different instruments. The relatively high degree of audibility given to the rhythm by its placement in the uppermost voice again suggests that Berg considered rhythm to be of greater importance in establishing structural relationships than he did pitch. In fact, although all twelve pitches appear in measures 36 and 37, only the first eight pitches of the row appear in the original order in the second violin, diminishing still more the possibility of structural identification of these measures through pitch perception, and conversely strengthening the importance of the rhythmic element. Another concept of the diatonic system which appears to be operative here is that of the establishment of a particular premise, the subsequent creation of tension or expectation by the digression from this premise, and the final relaxation of tension or fulfillment of expectation by returning to the original state. This is, of course, not a concept unique to the art of diatonic music; it amounts basically to the tautology that something is felt to be missing by the very fact that it is not present. The concept may be seen at work in the first thirteen measures of the Lyric Suite. In the first measure the twelve of the chromatic scale are stated on the first three beats, and on the fourth beat all the white notes are recapitulated with the exception of F, the first pitch of the row to be exposed in the next measure (Ex. …

The Secret Programme of the Lyric Suite. 3

The Secret Programme of the Lyric Suite. 3