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Composing with a Multitude of Twelve-Tone Entities: Luigi Dallapiccola's Il prigioniero

2013; Perspectives of New Music; Volume: 51; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/pnm.2013.0009

2325-7180

Paul Sheehan,

Diverse Musicological Studies

COMPOSING WITH A MULTITUDE OF TWELVE-TONE ENTITIES: LUIGI DALLAPICCOLA’S IL PRIGIONIERO PAUL SHEEHAN HIS PAPER EXAMINES the interaction among a select group of what I call “twelve-tone entities” in Luigi Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero (1948), drawing attention to unique aspects of the composer’s approach, making claims for interpretation, and suggesting a more inclusive conception of twelve-tone music generally. Il prigioniero’s twelve-tone entities form a multitude, an abstract network of twelvetone entities that interact in various ways. A multitude is neither hierarchical nor anarchical; “it is composed of . . . elements that remain different, one from the other, and yet communicate, collaborate, and act in common.”1 Three features of Il prigioniero make it unusual in comparison with the more familiar works from the serial canon. First, rather than constraining the pitch material to a single row and its canonical T 100 Perspectives of New Music transformations, Dallapiccola opts for a multitude of referential twelvetone constructs to generate pitch material. In not limiting itself to a single “basic set” (as Schoenberg calls it) and its transformations, Il prigioniero pays homage to Alban Berg’s Lulu, and, at the same time, calls into question Schoenberg’s claim that a twelve-tone composition ’s “unity” depends on what can be thought of as a single basic set constraint.2 I mention this feature first not to promote it as innovative or radical but rather to emphasize that not one, but many “rows” or other sorts of twelve-tone formations govern pitch material in the opera. Second, numerous twelve-tone sets in Il prigioniero never appear as rows but instead materialize consistently and exclusively as successions of simultaneities—dyads, trichords, and so on. Such entities are at best only partially ordered in time. Dallapiccola alludes to this feature in his prose writings in which he consistently distinguishes between fundamentally linear and fundamentally chordal sets—between total orderings in time of the twelve pitch classes and partial orderings of the twelve pitch classes, or, put yet another way, between apparently conventional rows and successions of chords never realized as rows.3 This consistent presence of exclusively chordal sets that never appeal to some referential total ordering is one of the opera’s significant features. The third feature foregrounds Dallapiccola’s treatment of register. Certain twelve-tone formations retain register-specific ordering rather than varying in terms of register as do conventional rows. Formations that retain fixed ordering in register comprise a majority of the twelvetone constructs in Il prigioniero and exert a significant presence in other works by Dallapiccola as well. Strangely this ramified idiosyncrasy goes unexplored in the literature. Before describing what I mean by “twelve-tone entity” and discussing interaction among the multitude, I briefly consider how Dallapiccola ’s approach overlaps with some well-known serial techniques: combinatoriality, composition with arrays, and creating a derived series. The differences hinge upon various approaches to ordering these techniques betray. 1.0 COMBINATORIALITY, ARRAYS, AND THE DERIVED SERIES A number of twelve-tone combinations in Il prigioniero never realized as twelve-tone rows are best understood foundationally as successions of chords; efforts to find strictly linear realizations of these chordal sets inevitably end in frustration. The notion of partial ordering captures this aspect of Dallapiccola’s technique: ordering Luigi Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero 101 that, for some pairs of pitch classes, says nothing about which one comes before which. An example is the succession of triads Dallapiccola mentions in his first public commentary on Il prigioniero. He informs readers that “two perfect major triads and two perfect minor triads—the twelve tones are concentrated in the triads of C major, Bb minor, D major, and finally G# minor—represent the harmonic nucleus of the chorus.”4 The construct described begins the opera’s Second Choral Intermezzo, sung offstage (see Example 1). Using angle brackets to enclose ordered sets and braces to enclose unordered sets, this formation is expressed as an ordered set of unordered subsets as follows: This twelve-tone entity is a partial ordering of the twelve pitch classes; no ordering is specified among the three members of any of its constituent triads. All three members of the first triad...