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“La révolution dans la continuité”: The Presence of the Past in Bruno Maderna’s Creative Process (1948–55)
- Edited by Angela Ida De Benedictis
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- Book:
- Utopia, Innovation, Tradition
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 27 June 2023, pp 357-380
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Summary
… it is easy to understand that a new mentality and its manifestation in a new technique do not necessarily entail negation of the distant or immediate past. On the contrary, today we are more than ever convinced that natura non facit saltus …
For Bruno Maderna, exploration of new musical territory went hand in hand with a rethinking of the past. For one, he was convinced that, whether or not a composer is willing to acknowledge as much, there is always something of the old that lives on in the new in one form or another. Furthermore, in his own work, Maderna actively drew on practices from the past to invent new compositional strategies. In so doing with seemingly limitless imagination, he pioneered a wide range of compositional procedures that had a profound impact on contemporary music in the 1950s and beyond, with many of his inventions and ideas being taken up by other composers as well who had studied or worked with him. This essay examines a number of Maderna's compositional techniques to illuminate how he took inspiration from music and music theories from the past for his own new compositional techniques. The following examples are taken from works written between 1948 and 1955, during which time he developed his own version of (integral) serialism. My focus will be on Maderna's poetics and its sources of influence. I will not go into the impact of Maderna's techniques on other composers.
Like virtually every Italian composer of his generation – given the kind of training one would receive privately or in conservatories at the time – Maderna began writing in neoclassical styles. Following the works of his early maturity, he started to adopt twelve-tone techniques around 1948 within a musical language that remained largely neoclassical for another number of years, with stylistic influences notably from Bartók, Debussy, Hindemith, G.F. Malipiero, and Stravinsky. During these years, and with every work, Maderna rapidly expanded his compositional means, conceiving new techniques that were as much rooted in compositional principles known from the past as they broke new ground in thinking about musical material, within the aesthetic program of the avant-garde.
12 - Form and Serial Function in Leibowitz’s Trois Poèmes de Pierre Reverdy
- Edited by Julie Pedneault-Deslauriers, Nathan John Martin, Steven Vande Moortele
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- Book:
- Formal Functions in Perspective
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 26 May 2021
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2015, pp 373-410
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Summary
Trois poèmes de Pierre Reverdy, one of the last works by René Leibowitz (1913–72), is a set of three short songs for four voices and piano. Composed in 1971, a year before the composer's death, the work raises interesting questions about form and style. We will first consider a few excerpts to acquaint the reader with the unique and unmistakably French flavor of Leibowitz's musical language. We will then discuss Leibowitz the theorist and proceed to analyze his Trois poèmes, calling upon compositional and analytical concepts discussed in Leibowitz's unpublished treatise on form in serial music, “Traité de la composition avec douze sons” (ca. 1950).
Example 12.1 shows the beginning of the first movement. The opening piano phrase in measure 1 sounds disjunct and Webernian. It serves to introduce the choral phrase that follows in measures 2–3, which is in contrast very smooth, with much oblique and stepwise motion. This pairing of a piano solo measure with a continuing choral phrase is replicated in the following measures (4–6), suggesting a simple principle of form-building and raising questions about what will follow.
Example 12.2 shows the beginning of the second movement. Its texture (double canon) in a simple declamatory rhythm recalls examples from the choral music of Mendelssohn, Brahms, Schoenberg, and Webern. In contrast to the opening of the first movement, whose phrases are clearly demarcated, the phrases here almost all overlap.
The texture of the third movement is completely different. The piano opening shown in example 12.3a makes a clear reference to the first Gymnopédie of Erik Satie. Finally, the end of the third movement, shown in example 12.3b, includes a succession of major and minor triads, concluding the work on an extended tonal harmony with a distinctly “French” sound (a major triad in second inversion with added augmented fourth in the last measure). These excerpts cause us to wonder: how can the relatively conservative use of a single twelve-tone row be made to assume such different musical characters; how do the final chords at the end of the third movement come about; and how does Leibowitz articulate form in such different environments?