Where Are We Going? Teleological Structures in New Music

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Redgate, Roger. 2020. Where Are We Going? Teleological Structures in New Music. Principles of Music Composing, 20, pp. 23-34. ISSN 2351-5155 [Article]

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Official URL: https://xn--urnalai-cxb.lmta.lt/en/issue/muzikos-k...

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The beginning of the twentieth century saw some radical changes in compositional thought. The breakdown of tonality in particular had far wider implications than just the emancipation of dissonance and organisation of pitch, extending to formal design and the functionality of material, further challenging pre-existing formal structures. Anton Webern was perhaps the first composer to radically redefine the compositional process in this respect, later influencing the work of Boulez and Stockhausen.

How to articulate a formal narrative without functional harmony, however, was one of the central issues, which lead to serial organisation. Post-serial thinking further developed a complex network of parametric formal strategies aimed at creating such a dialogue, redefining the function of material and initiating new kinds of formal structures, which similarly require new approaches to listening and perception. How might gesture, density and texture be used to articulate form? How are such structures to be assimilated? How does a composer create a sense of structural narrative? Is this even necessary with new approaches to listening?

This paper will examine some of these developments and how they inform my own compositional practice, which involves the complex interaction of parametric layers, with a view to creating a structural hierarchy and meaningful, unfolding dialogue between materials on both the macro and micro levels. My more recent work has further challenged the need for such formal continuity and narrative in an attempt to redefine the structural functionality of material.

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Article

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Keywords:

Boulez, Webern, Redgate, Ferneyhough, teleology, formal narrative, Etudes Transcendantales, Le Marteau sans Maître, Drei Kleine Stücke Op. 11

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