Graham Newcater's orchestral works : case studies in the analysis of twelve-tone music

Abstract

The aim of this thesis has been four-fold, namely: i) to present an overview of twelve-tone theory and practice, particularly that practice that admits a background of traditional procedure; ii) to pinpoint the linguistic problems that twelve-tone music presents; iii) to suggest a style of analysis that makes coherent the linguistics of twelve-tone music; iv) to present in-depth case studies of four representative orchestral works of the South African composer, Graham Newcater, not only so as to make available analyses of his works, but also so as to provide practical exegeses of the theoretical problems listed in ii) and iii). Part I of this thesis is, therefore, synthetic rather than original. It sets out the premises of the serial principle, its structural implications, its historic-stylistic background, and problems in analysis. In Parts II and III various of Newcater's orchestral works are presented as case studies in the analysis of twelve-tone music with particular reference to the issues discussed in Part I. As is shown to be the case with Schoenberg in Part I, three out of four of Newcater's works are treated as examples of rhetoric that synthesizes serial principles and tonal syntax. It has therefore not been sufficient to analyze the sounding forms of the music as entirely the product of the various sets and their structural implications; on the contrary, it has been necessary both to justify the aesthetic validity of this synthesis and to examine the results. The First Symphony, the composer's first major work, and the Violin Concerto, one of a group of concertos written fairly recently, best illustrates Newcater's fusion of the twelve-tone and tonal worlds. The Variations de Timbres represents an attempt to create rhetoric more inherently compatible with the serial principle. Both in that it seems that this is the direction that Newcater is likely to take in the following decade, and in that the Variations undoubtedly represents one of Newcater's most valuable creative essays, its inclusion seems justified. The last work analyzed is the composer's Third Symphony. Its extensive treatment in Part III of this thesis is justified in that it clearly derives from the compositional idioms of all three works analyzed in Part II. Both in sound and in syntax, it is the most sophisticated of Newcater's orchestral works to date, and, in its assimilation of the influence of electronic music on live instrumental music, it also suggests a route that Newcater's compositional career might take. In that Newcater emerged, in his early career, as the first pioneering spirit in the use of the twelve-tone system in South Africa, in that his approach to twelve-tonalism is clearly derived from Schoenberg's, and in that, he possesses a compositional gift of undeniable strength, his works seemed to present an ideal vehicle for the concepts and issues set out in Part I of this thesis. No single approach or analytical method has been employed, although obviously the procedures explored by such specialists as George Perle and Milton Babbitt have provided the basis for set analysis. Beyond this, more traditionally 'descriptive' methods have been used, and the conceptual studies of Theodor Adorno and Leonard B . Meyer has provided invaluable points of reference. In that this thesis is concerned primarily with linguistics which the twelve-tone the theory produces, all analysis is largely concerned with pitch content. Where a reference to the other parameters is made, it is generally in the service of this aspect of Newcater's music