Bartók’s Third String Quartet, often identified as an affirmation of the composer’s fundamentally modernist stance, has been approached with a variety of post-tonal analytical methods, many of them pitch-class oriented. Certain features of the work suggest that a method that specifically privileges pitch, yet also allows for limited ‘impingement’ by pitch-class considerations, would yield valuable insights into its structure. The ‘sites’ chosen for analysis exemplify various types of textures and procedures that seem especially significant to the quartet as a whole.

Throughout its 150-year history New York City's Central Park has inspired writers, painters, poets, and musicians. In 1906 Charles Ives was moved by its rich soundscape to compose his orchestral piece Central Park in the Dark; nearly one hundred years later, in 2005, the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude unfurled 7500 saffron-coloured cloth panels for a sixteen-day installation at the park. Although separated by a century, these artworks appear similarly preoccupied with the construction, manipulation, and perception of nature and place, honouring and celebrating the park as a naturalistic setting, while also acknowledging it as a fabricated entity, shaped by human interactions, and as an ongoing cultural project. The present article suggests parallels between Ives's construction of the park in sound, and ‘Christo's Gates’, as the installation became known – parallels that suggest the continuing resonance of Ives's musical contemplation, as well as the issues that occupied its composer as the Gilded Age gave way to the progressive era.

In his Third String Quartet, Bartók often spins out melodic lines from brief motives, and the spinning-out frequently takes the form of motivic chains – a linkage of two motives where the last note or notes of the first become the first note or notes of the next, and the two are related by one of the four traditional serial transformations: transposition, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion. There are thus four kinds of motivic chains: transposition (T) chains, inversion (I) chains, retrograde (R) chains, and retrograde inversion (RI) chains. Chains of this kind, especially I-chains and RI-chains, shape not only the melodic lines of the quartet but also its harmonic progressions. They lend the quartet a quasi-serial organization at a time when the composer thought he was ‘approaching a species of twelve-tone music’.

This essay explores the perceptions of value that circulate around Arvo Pärt’s early tintinnabuli works Tabula Rasa (1977) and Spiegel im Spiegel (1978). Western reception hears Pärt’s music as either ‘spiritually deep’ or musically ‘flat’. By understanding how modernist subjectivity translates into standards of musical value, I attempt to dismantle the biases inherent in both camps and go on to consider Pärt’s early tintinnabuli works in terms of both spirituality and postmodernism. Couched in the religious revivalism of the 1970s, Tabula Rasa offers a narrative of transcendence that performs a Neoplatonic model of subjectivity built directly from Orthodox praxis and supplies an alternative to dominant Soviet cultural narratives. By the 1980s Western marketing of tintinnabuli transformed the influence of religion into the visual and linguistic rhetoric of ‘holy minimalism’. Does commodification leech out spiritual ‘depth’ from Pärt’s music? The essay responds to this question by turning to Fredric Jameson’s ‘antinomies of postmodernism’ and an analysis of Spiegel im Spiegel’s musical stasis, process, surface, and depth. While Jameson’s postmodernism still finds value in modernist subjectivity, this essay suggests an alternative way of understanding musical value through a consideration of Pärt reception and experiences of illness.

Larry Starr's analysis of Charles Ives's ‘The Cage’, in his book A Union of Diversities, contrasts with most readings of the song in that he focuses on how the points of congruence between the highly dissimilar vocal and piano parts form a ‘powerful unity’. However, he provides no specific analytical method for examining this unity more closely. This study offers one such method for ‘The Cage’, revealing a path within a virtual, bounded space that correlates with some of the syntactic and semantic aspects of the song's text. These syntactic correlations also hold true in a similar passage in Ives's song ‘Majority’.

Conlon Nancarrow is often classified as an ‘experimental’ composer. Definitions of experimentalism in twentieth-century music, however, vary widely, from general ones simply requiring the invention of new compositional techniques to some of John Cage's more specific definitions, which advocate indeterminacy. Nancarrow's music, pioneering in its use of the player piano and its exploration of rhythm and tempo, easily fulfils the criteria for experimentalism in a general sense, yet is by no means indeterminate. Nancarrow does not set up experiments and let them take their course, but rather carefully crafts his compositions, drawing on more traditional techniques of motivic development, counterpoint, and formal planning. Through analyses of Nancarrow's Studies nos 21 and 36 for player piano, I shall suggest that it is through the interaction of experiment and tradition that Nancarrow highlights the perceptibility of what is most experimental in his music: the highly novel approaches to the structuring of musical time.

Arthur Vincent Lourié (1891–1966), futurist, communist commissar of music, and close friend of Stravinsky in Paris in the 1920s, was an important member of avant-garde Russian artistic circles in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Yet by the 1950s he seems to have faded into obscurity. This article attempts to fill the gap left by the lack of discussion of the strange permutations of Lourié’s career after his emigration in 1922 by way of an analysis of his miniature 1961 song cycle Zaklinaniya (‘Incantations’). The cycle consists of five settings of lines from Anna Ahkmatova’s Poema bez geroya (‘Poem Without a Hero’), whose first part recalls Lourié and Akhmatova’s shared past in Russia’s Silver Age. Akhmatova (1889–1966), an intimate friend of the dandyish Lourié and at the centre of avant-garde artistic circles in pre-Revolutionary St Petersburg, describes the early 1910s as a Meyerholdian nightmarish masquerade in which the protagonists were constantly in danger of losing their identity through nihilistic role playing. Lourié’s elusive figure can be seen as the embodiment in the Poema of the frightening, superfluous shadow with ‘neither face nor name’. Rather than any unfortunate turn of political or personal history, it was Lourié’s affection for masks – for taking up exaggerated poses and concealing his real face – that provides the most compelling reason for his gradual disappearance from view in the chaos of the first half of the twentieth century.

Analysis of the spatial elements of popular music recordings can be made by way of the ‘sound-box’, a concept that acknowledges the way sound sources are perceived to exist in four dimensions: laterality, register, prominence, and temporal continuity. By late 1972 producers working across a range of styles and in different geographical locations had adopted a normative positioning of sound sources across these dimensions. In 1965 no such norm existed. This article contextualizes the notion of the sound-box within academic discourse on popular music and explores the methodology employed by a research project that addressed the gradual coming-into-existence of the norm, which the project defined as the diagonal mix. A taxonomy of types of mix is offered, and a chronology of the adoption of the diagonal mix in rock is presented.

Pet Sounds, the landmark Beach Boys album of 1966, has received wide acclaim as one of rock’s first ‘concept albums’. It also represents a milestone in the artistic evolution of the group’s primary creative force, Brian Wilson. A thorough examination of the texts and music of the songs of Pet Sounds reveals a unified art work projecting a coherent textual narrative. Songs are associated and interrelated via recurrent motives and harmonic patterns, expressing extremely personal themes of romance and heartbreak. The musical ideas are mostly culminations of Brian Wilson’s earlier work – they are the ‘pet sounds’ that he had been raising and nurturing since the early 1960s – but they appear here in an unprecedented artistic context. Despite Wilson’s continued, if sporadic, productivity in the decades that followed, including the ill-fated Smile project, Pet Sounds stands as his crowning artistic achievement, an album with vast appeal and broad influence.