This presentation presents a model for neotonal analysis using British composer William Alwyn’s Symphony No. 4 (1959) as a case study. The work paradoxically combines an eight-against-four row partition with a musical language that sounds unmistakably diatonic, if not tonal. Its octachord includes two diatonic collections as subsets, and its tetrachord features four consecutive perfect fifths. While the work’s “rows” bring certain serial presuppositions to the fore, Alwyn uses the scales as looser (non-serial) partitions of the aggregate, segmenting musical motives from scalar subsets. Building on previous theories of neotonal music, I contend that the Fourth Symphony’s point of contact with twentieth-century atonality is the tonal effacement of its segments. I present five techniques of tonal cloaking: underdetermination, overdetermination, layering, juxtaposition, and duplicity, techniques that take the absence of heard scale degrees as their core tenet. The methodology captures these techniques using Steven Rings’s scale-degree/pitch class ordered duple nomenclature (in tonally clear spans) folded into more versatile association networks, where a motive’s non-tonal criteria (e.g. rhythm, ordered pitch interval) can be modelled. Specific focus on underdetermination, juxtaposition, and layering across the symphony’s three movements reveals motivic conflicts, as row subsets vie for perceptual prominence. On a large scale the narrative paradigm Alwyn favors is presenting row subsets in tonal obscurity, only later revealing tonal-triadic clarity in end-weighted climactic spans. Because select pitch classes of both octachord and tetrachord occasionally bleed into one another, I further correlate the degree of row synthesis (i.e. when a pitch from one row appears in the other’s) with tonal/triadic clarity, giving previous studies framing the work as a “battle” between the rows a Hegelian tint. The subsets do not so much stay segregated and battle each other, but rather learn to coexist (synthesize) as the symphony progresses. In addition to giving greater analytical clarity to the “neo” in this neotonal symphony, the methodology presented can elucidate crucial dramatic features in neotonal compositions beyond Alwyn.

This paper examines Morton Feldman’s late orchestral work Coptic Light (completed December 11, 1985) in the context of the composer's fascination with ancient Middle Eastern textiles. While Feldman’s relationships with abstract expressionist painters have received sustained scholarly attention, the influence of ancient Middle Eastern weaving on his late compositional strategies remains underexplored. Drawing on Feldman’s writings, I argue that ancient textiles offered him not simply visual metaphors, but structural models through which he reimagined musical form, perception, and notation.

Feldman was particularly drawn to what he called the “disproportionate symmetry” of handwoven textiles: patterns that appear symmetrical from a distance yet reveal subtle deviations on closer inspection. In Coptic Light, this principle shapes rhythm, pitch organization, orchestration, and even the visual layout of the score. These symmetries—palindromes, voice exchanges, and cyclic redistributions of patterns—are highly systematic yet often imperceptible in listening. What reaches the ear instead is a surface of continual variation: successive, closely related variants that resist stabilizing into a fixed model.

I suggest that these latent symmetries enact what Feldman described as “‘formalizing’ a disorientation of memory.” Rather than articulating large-scale teleological form, Coptic Light produces what he called “vibrating stasis”: a suspended musical surface animated by subtle rhythmic and harmonic flux. In this respect, the textile-inspired works of Feldman’s final decade offer a distinctive response to a compositional concern present throughout his career, redirecting listeners away from hierarchical formal listening and toward an intensified experience of the present moment.

The weight of tradition hangs over the music of Helmut Lachenmann. A protégé of Luigi Nono and a self-proclaimed “patricidal child of Darmstadt” (1996, 342), Lachenmann was trained in a serial idiom that stripped music of conventional harmonic, melodic, and scalar formulae. But as he developed a critical approach to music that stages confrontations with the classical tradition and defies his Darmstadt patrimony, his music has increasingly reincorporated aspects of tonality, drawing listeners into intertextual engagement with their tonal memories and perceptions. Yet these renewed encounters are decontextualized, “evacuated” of familiar significations (Brodksy 2017); to borrow the composer’s playful term, they are “tonaloide,” not truly tonal (Lachenmann 2021, 343). Drawing on work on contemporary tonality and intertextuality by Brodsky (2017, 2018), Drott (2003), Harrison (2015), Johnson (2017), and Korsyn (1991), this paper will excavate techniques through which Lachenmann develops alienated tonality and explore the perceptual functions of these tonal references.

Lachenmann often presents triads and diatonic scales at the perceptual boundaries of recognizability, with aural identification obscured by high velocity, registral extremity or dispersion, brevity, textural complexity, or the use of extended instrumental techniques. Moreover, these tonal materials are often incorporated within atonal structural devices, such as twelve-tone rows or chords, with the result that tonality is dialectically recontextualized as an aspect of atonal structure. My Melodies provides an example of extremely fast triads stratified into twelve-tone chords. Further examples from “Filter-Schaukel” (1980) and Concertini (2005) demonstrate how triads can emerge uncannily from clusters and aggregates. Serynade (1998) and Sakura-Variationen (2000) show how tonal materials can also emerge from formulaic interval patterns, such as alternating interval cycles and expanding interval sequences. Finally, the paper will conclude with a discussion of how tonal aspects are transformed by their appearance in quotations stripped of identifying, recognizable characteristics, with examples drawn from Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (1996). Here as elsewhere, listeners perceive only fragmented shards of icons of German culture.