2004 Patricia Carpenter Emerging Scholar Award: Stravinsky's Discontinuities, Harmonic Practice, and the Guidonian Space in the "Hymne" from the "Serenade in A"
Patricia Carpenter, José Antônio Martins · 2016
Once taken as a sign of artistic inconstancy and stylistic whim, discontinuities in Igor Stravinsky's neoclassical works have gradually become a primary focus of music analysis.1 Generations of theorists have tried to reconcile Stravinsky's fragmented textures with the quest to hear coherent wholes, proposing analytical models that try to account for what Elliott Carter referred to as the music's unified fragmentation.2 Stravinsky's discontinuities operate not only on the surface of the music, but on large-scale levels as well. Surface-level discontinuities result from sudden changes of harmony, rhythm, melody, motive, and instrumentation. These phenomenal changes by themselves, however, are not incompatible with traditional notions of harmonic continuity, linearity, and coherence. Yet these surface-level changes often also signal large-scale discontinuities that result from the succession of contrasting and relatively self-contained sections or static blocks. It is the functional association of those blocks that more