Musicology Commons^™

Developing Variation In The Late Work Of Morton Gould And Why It Matters, J. Wesley Flinn

Gamut: Online Journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic

American composer Morton Gould (1913-1996) was remarkably consistent stylistically over the course of his compositional career; this project examines certain motivic transformational techniques used in two of his last works, Stringmusic (1993, winner of the Pulitzer Prize) and Remembrance Day (Soliloquy for a Passing Century) (1995). These techniques, which can generally be filed under the principle of developing variation, are: 1. Mirroring and reversal; 2. Rotation; 3. Motivic expansion and contraction; 4. Additive sets; and 5. Asymmetric injection. After an overview of each technique, I give a full analysis of the fourth movement of Stringmusic using the approaches described …