By: Nathan Cobb,
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Shenandoah University
Abstract:
The second movement of Elisabeth Lutyens String Trio, Op. 57 (1964) showcases her characteristic compositional approach, in which serial techniques are employed in the service of a rich gestural style. The musical surface of this movement is almost entirely saturated by interval-class 1 (ic1), issuing from a twelve-tone row that comprises two hexachords with set class (012367), related by I11. This row can also be segmented as three (0123) tetrachords, each containing two ic1 dyads. For most of the piece, Lutyens treats these tetrachords as unordered collections of pitches, preserving only the ic1 relationship within each dyad. Beyond pitch organization, Lutyens also introduces cyclical structures in meter and gesture. The movement cycles continuously through the time signatures 3/2, 5/4, and 2/2, while four distinct gestural ideas––defined by articulation, rhythm, and interval content––unfold in a fixed sequence. This video illustrates how Lutyens employs serial techniques to generate pitch material with specific intervallic characteristics, while freely adapting this material to align with the broader gestural trajectories that animate the work.
Selected Bibliography:
Forkert, Annika. “Elisabeth Lutyens.” Musik und Gender im Internet. Translated by Nancy Schuman. Last modified April 28,
Forkert, Annika. 2017. “Magical Serialism: Modernist Enchantment in Elisabeth Lutyens’s O Saisons, O Châteaux!” Twentieth
Century Music 14 (2): 271–303.
Parsons, Laurel. 2010. “Early Music and the Ambivalent Origins of Elisabeth Lutyens’s Modernism.” In British Music and
Modernism, 1895–1960, edited by Matthew Riley, 269–292. New York: Routledge.
Parsons, Laurel. 2016. “’This Imaginary Halfe-Nothing’: Temporality in Elisabeth Lutyens’s Essence of Our Happinesses.”
In Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers: Concert Music 1960–2000, edited by Laurel Parsons and
Brenda Ravenscroft, 197–236. New York: Oxford University Press.
About the Author:
Nathan Cobb is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Shenandoah University. His research focuses primarily on contemporary music, with projects ranging from midcentury electronic studio practices to French spectralism or post-millennial popular music. In recent work, he draws on archival materials housed at the Paul Sacher Foundation to trace the developing compositional style of Kaija Saariaho from the late-1970s into the mid-1990s. In addition to this music-based research, he also engages with contemporary philosophy, art, and cinema as part of his broader interest in the intellectual development of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His research is published or forthcoming in Perspectives of New Music, the Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, Criticism, and an edited volume, In Search of Morton Feldman: A Portrait of the Composer at 100 (Brepols Press, forthcoming).