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Harmonic Practices in Oliver Knussen's Music since 1988: Part I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2009

Julian Anderson
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Extract

At fifty, Oliver Knussen has an output of formidably accomplished works behind him, composed at consistently high levels of invention and imagination, instantly recognizable both for their harmonic language and their clear, resonant instrumentation. Yet, surprisingly in view of Knussen's long-established international reputation, the musicological and analytic fraternity has been slow to pick up on what Knussen has been up to since the mid-1970s. There is almost nothing in print which goes into any technical detail as to the painstaking methods by which these spontaneous-sounding pieces are built up. Knussen himself has written little about his own work – preferring, as with his conducting activities, to place the advocacy of the work of others on higher priority than his own.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tempo , Issue 221 , July 2002 , pp. 2 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2002

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References

1 See Taruskin, Richard, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, Vol.1, pp 335–45Google Scholar, especially 336–42.

2 It was devised by Ernst Krenek in the 1940s for his large choral work Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae (1944). As explained in the preface to the score of that work, Krenek was searching for modalities inherent in his generative 12-note row which might function analogously to the church modes. It was probably this modal aspect that initially attracted Stravinsky's attention to the technique. Paradoxically, it is not used in Stravinsky's own setting of the Lamentations, Threni. See Hogan, Claire, ‘Threni: Stravinsky's 'Debt to Krenek’, Tempo 141 (06 1982), pp.22–29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 For a definitive explanation of the Stravinsky rotation technique and its compositional implications, see Wuorinen, Charles Simple Composition (C. F. Peters Corporation, 1979 Google Scholar, reprinted 1994), pp.101–110

4 I have not been able to discover the origins of this technique. It was much used by Messiaen to generate chord progressions frequently found in his work after 1940, although Knussen was not aware of this fact since the term ‘transposed inversions’ was not used by Messiaen in his writings until much later, and even then not properly explained. It has also been used by several other contemporary composers, notably George Benjamin (see the opening chord progression of the third movement of At First Light, Faber Music, 1983). Benjamin must have learnt the technique from Messiaen.

5 Themes and Variations, NMC D062. This short variation has deliberately little audible relation to Summer is icumen in: the composer says he randomized the tune to liven it up a bit. [Personal communication].

6 The poets previously set by Knussen include Trakl, Plath, Apoilinaire, and A. A. Milne, as well as his librettist Maurice Sendak.

7 Programme notes to the DG recording.