Modern Music and After by Griffiths Paul;

Author:Griffiths, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

Example 46 Iannis Xenakis, Evryali

Hill’s assumption must be that ‘what can be altered without severe detriment’ lies open to the performer, but this may not be so, and perhaps is not so in some of Babbitt’s music, where in principle every detail is crucial. Example 47 shows the opening bar of his Post-Partitions for piano (1966), where a twelve-note aggregate is partitioned into dyads, each struck twice, so that there are twelve attacks. These attacks occur at twelve different time points in six simultaneous metres, a feature that the dynamic levels are designed to clarify, a direct relationship being maintained throughout the piece between dynamic level and time point on the scale ppppp = 1, pppp = 2, … fffff = 12, i.e., 0. The 4/4 barring in the example applies only to the triplet quaver units: on the triplet-semiquaver level, there are two notional bars in the example, and on the quintuplet-semiquaver level there are one and two-thirds.

The dynamic levels make it clear that, for instance, the first C in example 47 is at time point one (metre counted in units of a triplet quaver) while the , occurring with it is at time point two (metre counted in triplet semiquavers), and the second occurrence of the same dyad is at time point four (metre counted in quintuplet semiquavers). In this bar two time points are struck in each of the six metrical streams: eight and zero in the semiquaver stream (each a low bass C), for example, or three and seven in that of septuplet semiquavers. These ‘time-point dyads’ are the rhythmic equivalents of the pitch-class dyads introduced, if the latter are numbered according to the usual convention that C is zero, C# one, and so on; hence, for example, –C has the numbering eight-zero, and –G is three-seven. There is thus a cohesiveness between pitch-class and rhythmic dispositions such as Babbitt had been seeking since his Three Compositions.

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