Text

theses

The 20th century’s movement away from tonality launched new genres of post-tonal compositional styles and aesthetics including free atonality, atonal expressionism, and serialism, first pioneered by Schoenberg and his pupils and later adopted by Stravinsky. By removing the psycho-emotional associations with traditional harmonic schema, atonal texted music challenged the centuries-long model of texted music, whose fundamental idiomatic basis has been the perceptible agreement or likeness between the qualities of the music and the qualities of the text. To that end, this dissertation examines Schönberg’s Friede auf Erden, Four Songs for Chorus and Ensemble, and Dreimal Tausend Jahre, Webern’s Entflieht auf Leichten Kähnen, and Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and Threni with an original methodology for examining text-painting mechanisms, referred to as the Layered Communicative Analog Methodology (LCAM), in an effort to identify and codify the communicative mechanisms of expressivity present in these works. Building on concepts of such expressivity by theorists like Stecker, Ridley, Levinson, Lewin, and others, in addition to examinations of cultural associations with consonance and dissonance by Guernsey and Cazden, this study demonstrates a spectrum of expressivity present in texted music between the theoretical and the experiential, and the unique ways that atonal texted music occupies this spectrum.

ETD_8472

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Martin Sedek

doi:10.7282/T33R0X0S

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.