reply to Carl

Hi Carl! You wrote:

> Can you give any examples of pre-serial atonal music?

Sure - the "canon" for this stuff includes any middle-period Schoenberg,
say the songs in the "Book of the Hanging Gardens" for example; or any
early Webern or Berg (again, songs are often good for this).

> And while I'm on it, serial tonal music?

Can't help you there, though I remember coming across some "7-tone" music
with diatonic rows. Sounds like something Stravinsky would have done (he
has a lot of "white-note" music, and his serial stuff tends to use rows of
fewer than 12 motes, like his setting of "Do Not Go Gentle...", which has
a 5-note row)--but it wasn't him.

But there *have* been a couple of good analyses of tonal music that use
pc-set analysis, despite this generally being unadvisable. Ben Boretz's
analysis of the opening of the Tristan prelude is a good example, in
Perspectives of New Music 11/1. Of course it doesn't "explain" all the
music and should be considered in conjunction with a standard tonal
analysis.

Allen Forte has a published analysis of a Brahms string quartet (I think)
that uses pc-set analysis. David Huron, a music cognition guy who wrote
the Humdrum software for machine-assisted analysis, wrote a very good
rebuttal of Forte's analysis, showing that the pc-set motives that Forte
identified as characteristic, could be applied equally as well to
companion pieces by Brahms (I think it was a set of 3 quartets). Anyway as
I said it was an excellent rebuttal and totally solid, but I don't know if
it ever got published - last time I talked to him he told me it had been
refused, probably by an editor who didn't like to quarrel with Forte.
(This wasn't the other article I was talking about that rebuts Forte's
argument about the Eschbeg hexachord - I'll think of who that was soon).

Best --Jon

--- In tuning-math@yahoogroups.com, jon wild <wild@f...> wrote:
>

> > And while I'm on it, serial tonal music?

the best example (AFAIK) of serial tonal music is
Ben Johnston's _6th Quartet_.

i've posted a lot on this piece on the main tuning list.
check the archives.

-monz