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The Study of Britten: Triadic Harmony and Tonal Structure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1979

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Extract

In 1946, the critic Scott Goddard ended an enthusiastic and judicious discussion of Britten's achievement with this comment: ‘Whoever tries to discover the intrinsic quality of the music of Britten and his generation must take courage from what they possess in only a small degree, sufficient knowledge to form a judgment.’ Things ought to be very different today. We are able to consider Britten's life and work as a complete whole. We are able, and possibly even willing, to read the millions of words which have been written about him. If anything, the problem is not that we have too little knowledge to form a judgment, but too much; with so much material, so much information, so many opinions, to make any kind of decision about it all can seem, to the late twentieth-century mind, faintly improper. Worse still, I can state with some confidence that our knowledge of Britten and his music is still far from complete: the archive in the Britten-Pears Library at Aldeburgh contains a wealth of unpublished material of all kinds, from the diaries and letters which will no doubt be extensively quoted in Donald Mitchell's official biography, to sketches and drafts which will eventually enable authoritative discussion about Britten's working methods to take place.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

NOTES

1 A. L. Bacharach (ed.). British Music of Our Time (London, 1951; reprint of the 1946 edition), 211.Google Scholar

2 For a survey of the range of current projects, see Ward, Colin, The Great Britten Industry', New Society, 29 November 1979, 499f.Google Scholar

3 Keller's study was first published in Music and Letters, xxix (1948), and reprinted with a few minor revisions in Benjamin Britten. A Commentary on His Works from a Group of Specialists, ed. D. Mitchell and H. Keller (London, 195s), 319–51.Google Scholar

4 Musical Trends in the Twentieth Century (London, 1952), 324.Google Scholar

5 Monthly Musical Record, lxiv (1934), 89.Google Scholar

6 The Musical Times, cxx (1979), 421f.Google Scholar

7 Music and Letters, xxx (1938), 360.Google Scholar

8 Monthly Musical Record, lxviii (1938), 235–7.Google Scholar

9 Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners ‘Tristan’ (Bern and Leipzig, 1920), 265.Google Scholar

10 For Schenker's remarks on Schoenberg see his essay ‘Resumption of Urlinie Considerations’, available in English in S. Kalib's dissertation Thirteen Essays from the Three Yearbooks ‘Das Meisterwerk in der Musik’, Northwestern University, 1973; it was originally published in German in the second of the yearbooks (Munich, 1926).Google Scholar

11 Structural Functions of Harmony (London, 1954; 2nd edn., 1969), 76f.Google Scholar

12 Op. cit., 113.Google Scholar

13 Translation by Roy E. Carter, based on the third edition (London, 1978), 128. (Harmonielehre, Vienna, 1911; 3rd edn., 1922).Google Scholar

14 Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky’, in Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, ed. B. Boretz and E. T. Cone (Princeton, 1968), 123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 (Englewood Cliffs, 1976), 172.Google Scholar

16 Tonality, Atonality, Pantonality (London, 1958), 97, 153–4.Google Scholar

17 Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, c (1974), 214f.Google Scholar

18 See especially Felix Salzer, Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music (New York, 1952); Roy Travis, ‘Tonal Coherence in the first Movement of Bartók's Fourth String Quartet’, The Music Forum, ii (New York, 1970), 298–371; Robert P. Morgan, ‘Dissonant prolongation: Theoretical and Compositional Precedents’, Journal of Music Theory, xx (1976), 6272.Google Scholar

19 See Meyer, Explaining Music (Berkeley, 1973); Narmour, Beyond Schenkerism (Chicago, 1977).Google Scholar

20 See especially Charles Burkhardt, ‘Schenker's Motivic Parallelisms’, Journal of Music Theory, xxii (1978), 145–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Beyond Orpheus, (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).Google Scholar

22 Loc. cit.Google Scholar

23 The Music of Benjamin Britten (London, 1979).Google Scholar