By: Peter Silberman,
Ithaca College School of Music, Theatre, and Dance
Abstract:
The second movement of Elisabeth Lutyens’s String Trio, op. 57, consists of six members of the same row class, each realized almost identically. With so much sameness throughout this movement, how does the composer create a sense of form? Lutyens uses different types of pitch-class invariance and manipulations of order positions within each row to provide a sense of form and progression throughout this moment.
This work’s row consists of six consecutive interval class 1 dyads. Any even transposition of the row preserves these dyads whereas any odd transposition realigns pitch classes. The first three rows retain the initial dyadic pairs, while the middle two project different invariant ic1 dyads. The final row returns to the opening dyads creating an ABA’ ternary form
Manipulations of order positions and use of different types of rows also create a ternary form. The only rows that are presented without order position changes are the first and last (both P rows). Order in the other rows, all R rows, is increasingly jumbled, as each row repeats a previous order position change while adding more. These order position changes easily can be heard due to their effect on two prominent motives, which are inverted in the rows that include order position changes.
Bibliography:
Cobb, Nathan. 2024. “Elisabeth Lutyens: String Trio, Op. 57, ii (1964) | Twelve-Tone and Serial Composition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogPMqKu9SHU
Howland, Patricia. 2015. “Formal Structures in Post-Tonal Music.” Music Theory Spectrum 37/1: 71-97.
Parsons, Laurel. 2005. “Time Management with ‘Twelve-Tone Lizzie’: Dramatic Functions of Meter in a Scene from Elisabeth
Lutyens’s Music Drama ‘The Numbered.’” Theory and Practice 30: 153-183.
Parsons, Laurel. 2016. “’This imaginary halfe-nothing’: Temporality in Elisabeth Lutyens’s Essence of our happiness.” In
Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers: Concert Music 1960-2000. Ed. By Laurel Parsons and Brenda
Ravenscroft. New York: Oxford University Press: 197-219.
About the Author:
Peter Silberman is an associate professor of music theory and chair of the Department of Music Theory, History, and Composition at the Ithaca College School of Music, Theatre, and Dance. He also serves as coordinator of music theory and electives at Ithaca College’s Summer Music Academy, a residential camp for high school musicians, and is currently the president (2025-27) of the Music Theory Society of New York State. His research interests include music theory pedagogy, the theory and analysis of neotonal music of the twentieth century, and the analysis of popular music. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Journal of Popular Music Education, College Music Symposium, Gamut: Online Journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic, Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, Music Theory Online, The Horn Call, and in the anthologies The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches and Musical Currents from the Left Coast.