Conference Agenda

Previous analysis of Sessions’s music focuses on concepts such as the “long line,” progression, association, and gradual evolution into dodecaphonic composition. Although the literature on Sessions’s music has dwindled in the past thirty years, scholars have continued to elucidate the twelve-tone music of composers such as Schoenberg, Berg, and Dallapiccola, in part by showing the relevance of whole-tone + collections (WT+) and row partitioning to create motivic and harmonic material. Using sketches to support my analysis, I show that these collections are significant components of Sessions’s compositions as well. I examine their use in two of his twelve-tone works: the first movement of the Third Piano Sonata (1965) and Five Pieces for Piano (1974-5). In the piano sonata, the movement’s formal boundaries are marked by the hexachords that result from pairing the trichords taken from an even partition of the row. One of these hexachords is the WT+ set class 6-21 (023468). The climax of the movement features a trichordal complex (Alegant and Mead, 2012) that weaves in the other two WT+ hexachords, set classes 6-22 (012468) and 6-34 (013579). The sketches also suggest an interest in the CUP² property (Morris, 1990), which is obtained when sc 3-3 (014), 3-4 (015), or 3-11 (037) are paired with sc 3-12 (048). In a sketch for the Five Piano Pieces, Sessions takes an uneven partition of the row resulting in WT+ sc 6-22 (012468) hexachords. Even though the secondary row formed by these hexachords is the main source of material for the first and fourth pieces, my analysis demonstrates the meaningful connections among the pieces that result from interpreting everything in terms of the primary row. The significance of WT+ hexachords and row partitioning in these pieces raises a number of questions: How do these elements function in the rest of Session’s twelve-tone works? How do they inform or interact with other aspects such as the “long line” or formal parameters? And how do they all work together, or at odds, to realize the musical idea(s)?

Ligeti’s influential use of tone-clusters and fluctuating densities is well known. Yet, another facet of Ligeti’s compositional technique has, until now, been neglected, perhaps because it couldn’t be appropriately described or modeled beyond triviality. It’s been “hidden in plain sight.” This other well-known texture of Ligeti’s is a cascade of pitches promoting a sense of infinite descent or ascent (showcased in Devil’s Staircase, Infinite Column, and throughout many works from his 1968 Second Quartet and 1971 Melodien (likely inspired by Shepard/Risset/Tenney’s 1960s computer generated glissando illusion) onward. Through his career Ligeti forged his discretized directed textural motion into a flexible, malleable form-building device, one that accommodates gradual change and ambiguity within a web of complexity, and that, paradoxically, granted license to and inspired later 20^th-21^st century composers to baldly infuse their music with scalar and arpegiated passages while avoiding any association to scales or arpeggios in traditional tonal music. No other Euro-American avant garde post-war composer did this.

Although adjacent facets of Ligeti’s style have been studied (mechanico-patterns by Clendenning, the lament trope by Bauer), statistical form by Iverson, texture by Levy, and register by Bernard) none have made this distinctive facet of Ligeti’s style a point of focus, and none gave it any precise definition.

I model it by defining it as a quantifiable property, which therefore can flow and fluctuate over the course of a work or passage (or be algorithmically simulated). I call it the Textural Incline of Pitch (TIP) and define it as the proportion of (or difference between) the number of note-to-note ascents vs. descents, disregarding the distance of ascent or descent (therefore independent of pitch range). From one span (a beat, measure, etc) to another, the property can shift gradually (or abruptly).

This paper explains Textural Incline of Pitch (TIP) as a useful flexible concept apt for late 20^th and early 21^st century compositions by Saariaho, Haas, Ferneyhough, Berio, and others. As a textural phenomenon that emerges from the interaction of pitch and contour, TIP reveals and enables topical intertextually-based listening possibilities that are distinct from those brought into focus by other music-theoretic tools.