By: Joseph Straus , CUNY Graduate Center
Abstract of Video:
Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-1975) was an important and influential Italian twelve-tone composer. The second of his seven Goethe Lieder (1953) is a highly compressed setting of a song text that involves the surprisingly intimate relationship between the sun and the moon. The song is based on a pair of inversionally-related series forms and their retrogrades. A high level of invariance between the series forms adds to a sense of connection between the series which, like the sun and the moon, are different yet closely connected.
Bibliography:
Brian Alegant, The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola (University of Rochester Press, 2010).
Thomas DeLio, “A Proliferation of Canons: Luigi Dallapiccola’s Goethe Lieder No. 2,” Perspectives of New
Music 23/2: 186–195.
Michael Eckert, “Text and Form in Dallapiccola’s Goethe-Lieder,” Perspectives of New Music 17/2: 98–111.
Joseph Straus, The Art of Post-Tonal Analysis: Thirty-Three Graphic Music Analyses (Oxford University Press,
2022).
About the Author:
Joseph Straus is Distinguished Professor of Music Theory at the CUNY Graduate Center. With a specialization in music since 1900, he has written numerous technical music-theoretical articles and scholarly monographs on a variety of topics in modernist music, including Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1990), The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Stravinsky's Late Music (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Twelve-Tone Music in America (Cambridge University Press, 2009). He is also the author of Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory (4th ed., Norton, 2016).