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.

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.

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.

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.