Toru Takemitsu’s string quartet Landscape (1960), presented as a succession of tutti chords and bare dyads, recalls the slow movement of John Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts (1950) in its still, spare atmosphere. Landscape, therefore, connects to one of the the composer’s important philosophical and musical influences in the 1960s. Moreover, it displays his nascent understanding of and engagement with Japanese traditional music, in this case, the shō, a mouth organ used in gagaku music. My presentation will demonstrate how these twin influences manifest in the work’s gestures, pitch relationships, and timbre.

Gesturally, Landscape is structured in waves of activity, redolent of the breathing patterns of the shō. These waves are not identical in structure, but they have in common a central peak (> and f), like a forceful expulsion of breath, surrounded by quieter material, slowly breathing in or out. These gestural waves structure the quartet on the local level.

Takemitsu derives large-scale pitch relationships in Landscape from a 10-note collection based on two pentatonic ritsu scales. This collection provides the pitch background throughout. Secondarily, Takemitsu employs two specific harmonies contained within such 10-note collections. Not only does the opening harmony return at different transpositions, but, like the chords of Cage’s gamut, these sonorities are treated as fixed objects.

Landscape’s connections to Cage and to the shō are clearest on the level of timbre. Like Cage’s Quartet in Four Parts, Landscape is played without vibrato, giving the string sound a brittle, metallic quality. When combined with the breath-like phrasing, this timbre is reminiscent of the shō’s sound. Harmonics and bowing techniques provide gradations of color to the slow procession of chords.

All of these factors function both as references to Cage and as cultural markers with the shō as a point of reference. My analysis also reveals how Landscape relates to two later works, The Dorian Horizon for string ensemble (1964) and In an Autumn Garden for gagaku ensemble (1973). The currents Takemitsu explores in Landscape tap deep into the “river of sounds” to which he often referred, a flow of music without beginning or end.

Alberto Ginastera’s music has been described as characterized by extensive “recycling” of earlier works (Schwartz-Kates 1997), recurring “traits, gestures, and atmospheres” (Scarabino 1996), practices of musical citation and self-citation (Sottile 2016), and engagement with a network of Argentine musical topics and idioms (Plesch 2009). Across these analytical perspectives, Ginastera’s works appear as excessive: they point beyond themselves and exceed their own textual boundaries. In short, they are inherently transtextual (Genette 1982). Yet although these scholars often examine the same passages, the analytical categories they employ rest on divergent epistemological assumptions and lack a common framework capable of distinguishing among different forms of transtextuality while accounting for the structural relationships that connect them.

This paper proposes an analytical approach grounded in Gérard Genette’s (1982) theory of transtextuality and Malena Kuss’s (2012) formulation of Bearbeitung. Rather than organizing Ginastera’s oeuvre through stylistic taxonomies, I trace a network of transtextual relations ranging from direct citation and rearrangement to more complex processes of recomposition (Straus 1986; Beaudoin and Moore 2010), through which individual works coalesce into constellations of closely related pieces. The study proceeds in two stages. First, I survey multiple modes of textual linkage in excerpts drawn from across Ginastera’s output, including internal recompositions as well as citations of Wagner, Paganini, and Beethoven. Second, I examine a cluster comprising Pampeana No. 2 (1950), the Cello Sonata (1979), and the Cello Concerto No. 2 (1980), tracing processes of Bearbeitung and the relational structures that emerge among them. I conclude by considering the analytical and theoretical implications of this framework for rethinking the excessive ontology of the musical work in a post-tonal context.

Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021) compositional voice was recognizably distinct. But he frequently donned musical disguises, writing songs (“pastiches,” as he called them) that paid tribute to and sometimes parodied earlier Broadway, Tin-Pan-Alley, and operetta composers and lyricists. We hear a wealth of Sondheim’s pastiches in Follies (1971), a show about a reunion of Broadway performers from the 1920s through 1940s; and in Assassins (1991), which brings together successful and attempted presidential assassins from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley. In both musicals, every major character (non-exclusively) performs music that reflects their era.

In his two remarkable books of lyrics and commentary, Sondheim (2010 and 2011) detailed his influences and self-analyzed many of his songs, specifying precisely which composer or style he had imitated. While many of his pastiches perfectly counterfeit their earlier referents, this talk examines cases where Sondheim’s own distinct compositional voice breaks through. These fractured pastiches are dramatic: musical portrayals of problematic or troubled characters—people who can no longer function within existing social structures—attempting to express themselves earnestly. These pastiches-gone-awry often include the introduction of historically/stylistically aberrant dissonances; unusual phrase, metrical, and hypermetrical structures; inconclusive or abandoned cadences; and other devices that transport us from pastiche into (post)modernity.