Prokofiev’s Symphony no. 2, Yuri Kholopov, and the Theory of Twelve-Tone Chords
A small collection of works, including Prokofiev’s Symphony no. 2 (1924), include chords with all twelve pitch classes. Yuri Kholopov, the foremost late-Soviet theorist, considered twelve-tone chords a branch of twelve-tone technique. Taking Prokofiev and Kholopov as a starting point, and building o...
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Published in | Music theory online Vol. 24; no. 2 |
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Main Author | |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Chicago
Society for Music Theory
01.06.2018
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | A small collection of works, including Prokofiev’s Symphony no. 2 (1924), include chords with all twelve pitch classes. Yuri Kholopov, the foremost late-Soviet theorist, considered twelve-tone chords a branch of twelve-tone technique. Taking Prokofiev and Kholopov as a starting point, and building on prior scholarship by Martina Homma, I assemble a history and theory of twelve-tone chords. The central theoretical problem is that of differentiation: as all twelve-tone chords contain the same twelve pitch classes, there is essentially only one twelve-tone chord. Yet twelve-tone chords can be categorized on the basis of their deployment in pitch space. Twelve-tone chords tend to exhibit three common features: they avoid doublings, they have a range of about 3 to 5.5 octaves, and their vertical interval structure follows some sort of pattern. This article contextualizes twelve-tone chords within the broader early-twentieth-century experimentation with aggregate-based composition. |
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ISSN: | 1067-3040 1067-3040 |
DOI: | 10.30535/mto.24.2.8 |