Abstract
Elliott Carter’s recent music exploits a special combinatorial property of the all-trichord hexachord. I show how this property can be reconceived in terms of interesting and analytically significant musical transformations: three involutions on the pitch-class aggregate which constitute a Klein four-group, and which have a natural interpretation as the symmetry group on a particular 12-vertex geometrical structure. Accordingly the opening of Carter’s Figment II for solo cello can be analyzed transformationally as a complete traversal of this structure by just a few, striking, characteristic gestures.
This research is supported by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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Roeder, J. (2009). A Transformational Space for Elliott Carter’s Recent Complement-Union Music. In: Klouche, T., Noll, T. (eds) Mathematics and Computation in Music. MCM 2007. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 37. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04579-0_29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04579-0_29
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