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Disability And “Late Style” In Music, Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

“Late style” is a longstanding aesthetic category in all the arts. Late-style music is presumed to have certain internal qualities (such as fragmentation, intimacy, nostalgia, or concision) and to be associated with certain external factors (such as the age of the composer, his or her proximity to and foreknowledge of death, lateness within a historical period, or a sense of authorial belatedness with respect to significant predecessors). Upon closer inspection, it appears that many of these external factors are unreliably correlated with a musical style that might be described as late. Late style is often better correlated with the bodily …

Stravinsky's Serial "Mistakes", Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

In 1952, after the completion of The Rake's Progress, Stravinsky embarked on a remarkable voyage of compositional discovery. His late works differ from his earlier ones in striking and profound ways. During the final two decades of his life, every major work was almost shockingly new, right down to original, and ever-changing, principles of structural formation. The works in this period describe a succession of compositional firsts, including his first works to use a series (Cantata [1952], Septet [ 1953], Three Songs from William Shakespeare [1954]); his first fully serial work (In Memoriam Dylan Thomas [1954]); his …

Babbitt And Stravinsky Under The Serial "Regime", Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

It is a great honor and a personal pleasure to participate in this Symposium in honor of Milton Babbitt. Babbitt's work, his "thinking in and thinking about music," have so profoundly shaped my own work and the field in which I work, the field of music theory, that it is hard imagine what either would have been without him. I have a deep and grateful sense of his influence on me.

Babbitt's more general influence, his role in shaping our larger musical culture, is the topic of this article. I want to focus in particular on the 1950s and 1960s …

A Primer For Atonal Set Theory, Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

Atonal set theory has a bad reputation. Like Schenkerian analysis in its earlier days, set theory has had an air of the secret society about it, with admission granted only to those who possess the magic password, a forbidding technical vocabulary bristling with expressions like "6- Z44" and "interval vector." It has thus often appeared to the uninitiated as the sterile application of arcane, mathematical concepts to inaudible and uninteresting musical relationships. This situation has created understandable frustration among musicians, and the frustration has grown as discussions of twentieth-century music in the professional theoretical literature have come to be expressed …