The Variety of Order Relations in Webern's Music: Studies of Passages from the Quartet Op. 22 and the Variations Op. 30

Abstract

Pitch-class the first twelve-tone works of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. Aside from total orderings of the aggregate, row-based composition also involves many other types of pc orderings, including order relations between non-adjacent elements, partial orderings, and unordered sets. Different types of ordering may act at different levels of structure, and often cooperate at a given level to create subtle and complex interrelations among pcs. In much analytical practice, however, the concept of pc ordering in twelve-tone serial music is all too often simply equated with identifying rows. This is most common when surface pc orderings correspond well with total orderings in the underlying row structure, as they do in Webern's music. It is indeed ironic that the clearest evidence for Webern's concern with pc ordering issues his tendency to respect underlying orderings in row realization may actually have discouraged analysts from studying other facets of pc ordering in his music.1 I hope to show that Webern's music amply rewards analysis informed by a broader and deeper concept of ordering. Close study of excerpts from the Quartet for Violin, Clarinet, Tenor Saxophone and Piano op. 22 of 1930, and the Variations for Orchestra op. 30 of 1940, will demonstrate that total orderings, partial orderings, and unordered sets all of which may involve pcs either adjacent or non-adjacent in the underlying rows are valuable analytic tools for this repertoire.2 Both the potential for invariance and pc association evident in the underlying row structure and Webern's techniques for musical realization are the subject of this paper. The three parts of the paper focus on how various types of order relations and aspects of musical realization give rise to: I. local pc associations; II. longer-range pc associations or motions; and III. form. Folded into the first analysis of Part I is an overview of various types of order relations and some key sources in the secondary literature.3

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.