By: Joseph Straus , CUNY Graduate Center
Abstract of Video:
Lutosławski’s Funeral Music (1958) is a twelve-tone work for string orchestra. The series is a twelve-note segment of a <1, 6> combination cycle, that is, a twenty-four note cycle that alternates semitones and tritones. P-forms of the series move one way around the cycle; I-forms move the opposite way. The melodies based on the series are thus highly focused intervalically, and there is constant imitation between the parts, in both interval and pitch. The harmonies formed between the lines generally form members of sc(106) and/or its constituent intervals, creating a high degree of consistency between melody and harmony. As an added bonus, there is also a rhythmic design, although it operates independently of the twelve-tone pitch organization.
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).