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Serial Canon(s): Nono's Variations and Boulez's Structures

Iddon, Martin

Contemporary music review, 2010-06, Vol.29 (3), p.265-275 [Peer Reviewed Journal]

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  • Title:
    Serial Canon(s): Nono's Variations and Boulez's Structures
  • Author: Iddon, Martin
  • Subjects: Boulez, Pierre ; Canon ; Canons ; Composers ; Composition ; Compositional Techniques ; Luigi Nono ; Music ; Music history ; Musical Analysis ; Musical Works ; Nono, Luigi ; Pierre Boulez ; Rules ; Serialism ; Variations
  • Is Part Of: Contemporary music review, 2010-06, Vol.29 (3), p.265-275
  • Description: That there are links between the 'serial' and the 'canonic' is as commonly held a stance as one which proposes that 'new' music and 'old' music may be united by more than that which distances them. Although such a construction is doubtless plausible in many respects, it belies the ways in which what an individual composer might regard as 'canon' would affect that relationship between 'old' and 'new'. To demonstrate some of the ramifications of how this nexus is constructed, I examine how canon, as a technical device, is conceived within pieces at the beginning of the burgeoning European excitement at the possibilities of multiple serialism: I consider Pierre Boulez's Structure Ia and, in rather greater depth, Luigi Nono's under-examined Variazioni canoniche. I suggest that, while in Boulez's hands the idea of canon is one of something relatively fixed and deterministic, Nono's approach is closer to a conception which might have appeared more commonplace to a fifteenth-century mindset, treating canon as a device with a significantly greater degree of fluidity, amenable to multiple interpretations. I suggest, finally, that such differing approaches to this seemingly simple technical element may suggest a similar breadth of conceptions of 'the serial' in the wider work of Boulez, Nono, and, indeed, the other composers commonly gathered together under the rubric, the Darmstadt School.
  • Publisher: Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge
  • Language: English
  • Identifier: ISSN: 0749-4467
    EISSN: 1477-2256
    DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2010.535359
  • Source: Academic Search Premier
    Taylor & Francis Social Science & Humanities and Science & Technology Library Database Model
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