Nikos Skalkottas' Tender Melody represents the composer's late style of strict serial composition. Underlying the surface aspects of his music in this style, we find that the generation of desired harmonies, harmonic movement, musical gesture, phrasing, aural coherence, and even latent tonality, prove to be more important to Skalkottas than the generation of aggregates. Such musical attributes enable Skalkottas to maintain harmonic control and create distinct musical effects. The present analysis demonstrates Skalkottas' harmonic conception of twelve-tone composition through his unique approach to the formation of aggregates, and how he achieves latent tonality through this process.

It is typical of Skalkottas to cast a unique twist on traditional serial composition. His compositional technique is rather striking in that he uses two independent rows. Each is combinatorial, though neither derives from the other through permutation. Although each row is combinatorial, Skalkottas does not exploit this relationship, and neither does he use transpositions of either row. Latent tonality is created within the internal structure of each row and also between the rows. Abandoning the traditional approach to combinatoriality, Skalkottas presents a special type of aggregate formation; pitch-class similarities between pairs of hexachords enable Skalkottas to create alternating aggregate formations. His compositional process expresses features characteristic of combinatoriality, a slight twist, however, on the usual hexachordal combinatoriality. This compositional approach and its resulting tonal implications are presented through an analysis of Skalkottas' Tender Melody for cello and piano, written in 1949, the year of his death.

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British composer John Tavener regards himself as a fashioner of "musical icons." He first achieved wide recognition for the extravagant, theatrical cantata The Whale (1966) and similar works that followed soon after. Since his conversion to the Russian Orthodox faith in 1977, however, his music has taken on a more austere and introspective quality, inviting comparison with related tendencies in the music of Pärt and Górecki. Ikon of Light for mixed chorus and string trio (1983) is one of the most important works from this new phase in Tavener's compositional development. Its seven movements are organized symmetrically around a setting of a hymn to the Holy Spirit by the tenth-century mystic, St. Symeon the New Theologian. Within this symmetrical design, the harmonic language of the music moves from chromaticism to diatonicism and back again. Over the course of the work, such disparate materials as traditional Byzantine chant and twelve-tone rows are skillfully blended into a unified conception. Ikon of Light is both austere and evocative, displaying both strict compositional discipline and immediate aural accessibility. This presentation aims to show how such apparently contradictory compositional objectives are successfully combined in this important early example of Tavener's iconographic style.

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In an essay on his recent Etudes for piano, Ligeti acknowledges influences from an eclectic range of philosophers, mathematicians, artists, authors, and composers. In this paper I want to address questions that arise from Ligeti's remarks about the impact the return of the diatonic triad has had on his music by investigating further the affiliations between Ligeti's recent works, the voice-leading techniques of late nineteenth-century music, and how the union of these two concepts relate to aspects of chaos theory and fractal geometry. Moreover, this paper attempts to bridge the gap that currently exists between the spatial voice-leading analyses of the middle period works and the analyses of the more recent works that tend to divert attention away from Ligeti's harmonic domain.

Using neo-Riemannian operators and interval cycles, I relate the voice-leading connections between Ligeti's middle period works and his more recent pieces by considering what sorts of harmonic paradigms Ligeti continued to develop in his approach to voice-leading in the works from the 1980's. Through detailed analyses, I have concluded that advanced pitch relations which have a correlate in parsimonious voice-leading networks have significance in Ligeti's harmonic structures. However, unlike the music of the late nineteenth-century which systematically unfold cyclic structures, Ligeti seems to intentionally avoid cyclic unfoldings of these structures. This is consistent with the composer's aesthetic principle of exhibiting maximal diversity on the surface while maintaining a simple underlying structure. This paper closes by examining how the voice-leading paradigms that appear to structure the surface gestures of these works complement the existing analyses of these works and reveal a simpler, more elegant underlying structure.

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Henry Cowell's imaginative treatise, New Musical Resources, begun in 1916 and first published in 1930, has become something of a 20th-century theoretical icon: it seems either to have influenced or captured the approach to the organization of pitch or rhythm of numerous composers. Many of Cowell's innovative ideas resonate in his own music and the music of his contemporaries, including Becker, Crawford, Harrison, Hindemith, Ives, and Reger, Rudhyar, Ruggles, and Schoenberg, Seeger, and, especially, in music composed after the publication of New Musical Resources by the likes of Cage, Carter, Ligeti, and Xenakis. In particular, the rhythmic stratification of Conlon Nancarrow's music, composed mostly in the second half of the 20th century, provides an exemplary realization of Cowell's ideal of using ordered rhythmic systems similar to those of harmony and counterpoint.

Nancarrow cites Cowell's book as an important early influence on the development of his compositional style. It provided Nancarrow with the incentive to develop his rhythmic ideas more fully, a development that culminated in his concept of "temporal dissonance," though his interest in rhythmic complexity was firmly in place before his exposure to the treatise. The similarities between the rhythmic ideas of Cowell and Nancarrow are striking, and they speak to a broader trend in the twentieth century to expand rhythmic practices to incorporate the notion of rhythmic multiplicity. This paper begins with an exploration of the similarities between Cowell's rhythmic ratios and Nancarrow's tempo proportions, and then proceed to explicate Nancarrow's more abstract concept of temporal dissonance. An early work by Nancarrow, Study No. 2 for Player Piano, is analyzed in terms of its temporal dissonance. The paper concludes with a discussion of the significance of Cowell's and Nancarrow's rhythmic ideas to a larger body of contemporary works.

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Although recent theorists have expounded on Schenker's theory in an effort to render it more consistent and user-friendly, they have focused primarily on either the internal structure of the theory itself or the relationship between Schenkerian principles and particular musical events. Little attempt has been made to relate specific musical events to specific structural levels, and, as a result, few observations have been made about the relationships between musical events that are represented at different structural levels. This lack of connections between level and musical event is troubling for those who want to systematize Schenkerian theory, believing that it cannot function as a theory unless it is applied consistently at all structural levels.

The 8-line Urlinie presents a situation in which the process of forming connections between structural levels and specific musical events reveals inconsistencies within Schenker's theory. Unlike the other two Urlinie forms, the 8-line Urlinie cannot be interrupted, it can only be divided. The middleground phenomenon of division, unlike interruption, impedes the fundamental structure's progression to the harmonically supported 2 by treating 5 as an intermediary goal. As a result, the divided 8-line Urlinie is rendered inconsistent with Schenker's theory at large, and this is revealed when comparing the two graphs that display 8-line Urlinien in Free Composition (Schenker's graphs of the Allemande and Courante of Bach's sixth French Suite) with the compositions they represent. Thus, considering the connections between structural level and specific musical event that are implicit in Schenker's writings leads one to question the validity of the 8-line Urlinie, at least in its divided form. On the other hand, though, such consideration may enable the analyst to create graphs that are not only more consistent, but that are perhaps also more convincing, as alternative graphs of the Allemande and Courante attempt to show.

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Igor Stravinsky presents his listeners with a perplexing interpretative problem in his neoclassic compositions: is it essential for us to hear this music against the backdrop of common practice tonality? Many critics have described how Stravinsky's neoclassic works fall outside of common practice tonality. Pieter van den Toorn, for example, argues that the tonal references in these works are a subordinate feature as Stravinsky grounded his compositional aesthetic in the octatonic collection; consequently, any "tonalness" that we hear must be reconciled within a post-tonal environment.

In this paper, I will argue that in order to provide a more complete picture of Stravinsky's neoclassic compositions we must consider the role played by common practice tonality, observing how it interacts with the post-tonal elements as well as how Stravinsky uses prior routines and compositions. Thus, I propose that we view Stravinsky's works and compositional strategy through the fourth of Kenneth Burke's master tropes - irony. Irony, more than any other of Burke's master tropes, relies on its interaction with and relationship to other texts. It necessitates that the reader (or listener) be familiar with a number of texts in order to be able to read and comprehend how the author (or composer) uses irony to manipulate the former texts for goals different than their original. To this end, I will examine the role irony plays in several of Stravinsky's compositions including the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments and Symphony in C.

It has been proposed that a better pedagogical model for teaching tonal harmony-one that "celebrates the rich history of music and composing while providing students with tools, attitudes, and concepts that the musician of the next half-century is likely to need"-is a vertical or synchronic approach which "considers all centuries of practice simultaneously, and asks a students to confront the choices and restrictions of each system." As regards to the teaching of harmony and in contrast to traditional instruction in realizing figured bass and voice leading, this new approach would begin with an emphasis on chords and chord progression and stress the commonality of practice inclusive of the High Baroque (Bach and Handel) as well as the practices of the contemporary pop culture. Only after these share aspects are in place would there be an opportunity to delve into the unique aspects of a particular practice. Would such a model addresses the differences in practices in sufficient depth in order to give students the quality of knowledge and understanding expected of a professional musician? Is the Postmodern era likewise post-historical in that the pass and seemingly the future exist simultaneously so that all historical practices are part of the palette of possibilities for the present?