Octatonic collections appear in the works of many twentieth-century composers. Even a partial list of composers who use octatonic collections would include Samuel Barber, Bela Bartók, Ernest Bloch, Benjamin Britten, George Crumb, Claude Debussy, Irving Fine, Ross Lee Finney, Alberto Ginastera, John Harbison, Aram Khatchaturian, Witold Lutosławski, Olivier Messiaen, Darius Milhaud, Robert Morris, Jean Papineau-Couture, Krzysztof Penderecki, Francis Poulenc, Sergei Prokofiev, Maurice Ravel, Alexander Scriabin, Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, Toru Takemitsu, and Joan Tower, among others. That little has been written about octatonicism in serial music should hardly come as a surprise, since the eight-note collection would appear to be incompatible with strict serial technique. This chapter argues that Dallapiccola was a leading practitioner of what might be termed “twelve-tone octatonicism,” and shows that octatonic elements permeate his serial compositions, from the Liriche greche (1942–45) to Commiato (1972).

Roman Vlad was the first scholar to note Dallapiccola’s penchant for octatonic harmonies. In a 1957 monograph, Vlad describes the “octophonic feeling” of two works composed in the 1940s as follows:

Example 5.1 redraws two of Vlad’s analytical illustrations. Example 5.1(a) shows that the row of the first Machado song includes subsets drawn from two different octatonic scales. The first seven notes are part of what I call the c/c♯ collection, while the last six notes belong to the c/d collection; G♭ functions as a pivot between the two. Example 5.1(b) in turn demonstrates that the first vocal phrase of the Tre poemi articulates a 5+7 octatonic division: the first five notes belong to the c/c♯ collection while the last seven are part of the c/d collection.