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‘SUBTLE SHIFTS’: HOWARD SKEMPTON'S TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY MODERNISM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 March 2018

Arnold Whittall
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Abstract

Howard Skempton's distinctive presence on the British musical scene, and his prolific compositional output since the mid-1960s, have presented commentators with certain challenges as they contemplate which labels to apply, and, for music analysts, which techniques to deploy. Skempton's own comments, in various interviews and essays down the years, remain the ideal starting point, suggest a range of contexts, some of which underpin this study. With reference to a few of his smaller vocal and keyboard compositions, the quality of constantly shifting rather than strictly fixed elements is explored. When pitch materials conform more or less exactly to tonal or modal tradition, rhythm is particularly important as a determinant of subtle shifting. But it is often the case that pitches identities themselves shift between functions best defined as tonal scale degrees at one extreme and post-tonal pitch classes at the other. The result is a very personal and unaggressive kind of modernism.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Information
Tempo , Volume 72 , Issue 284 , April 2018 , pp. 7 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

1 Pace, Ian, ‘Archetypal Experiments’, The Musical Times 38, no. 1856 (1997), p. 14 Google Scholar.

2 See Whittall, Arnold, Exploring Twentieth-Century Music: Tradition and Innovation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

3 Fallas, John, ‘Howard Skempton in Interview’, TEMPO 66, no. 262 (2012), pp. 23–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Taruskin, Richard, Music in the Late Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 101 Google Scholar.

5 Pace, ‘Archetypal Experiments’, p. 13.

6 See Whittall, Exploring Twentieth-Century Music, and also ‘“Let it drift”: Birtwistle's modernist music-dramas’ in Harrison Birtwistle Studies, ed. Beard, David, Gloag, Kenneth and Jones, Nicholas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 1–25 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Müller, Hans-Christoph, ‘Emanzipation der Konsonanz: Howard Skemptons Orchesterstück Lento ’, MusikTexte 75 (1998), pp. 77–83 Google Scholar.

8 For these concepts, see Schoenberg's, Arnold Theory of Harmony (London: Faber and Faber, 1978)Google Scholar and Structural Functions of Harmony (London: WW Norton, 1969)Google Scholar. See also footnote 10.

9 For relevant analyses of the Bach and Chopin Preludes, see Schenker, , Five Graphic Music Analyses (New York: Dover, 1969)Google Scholar and Salzer, Felix, Structural Hearing (New York: Charles Boni, 1952)Google Scholar.

10 For a penetrating consideration of the pros and cons of ‘suspended tonality’ as a theoretical concept see Kurth, Richard, ‘Suspended tonalities in Schoenberg's twelve-tone compositions’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Center 3 (2001), pp. 239–66Google Scholar.

11 For critical exposition and exploration of these techniques, see Straus, Joseph, Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1990, and subsequent editions)Google Scholar, Whittall, Arnold, Introduction to Serialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.