AbstractsLanguage, Literature & Linguistics

At this time, the extant analytical work on Krzysztof Penderecki’s music falls into two basic categories: those works that address his earlier, more strictly avant-garde compositions in terms of Sausseurian binary parametric oppositions, or those that consider his more mature works, such as the St. Luke Passion, solely in terms of foreground motivic content. As insightful and valuable as many of these studies are, none has addressed the notion of an emergent comprehensive pitch structure in works such as the Passion, in which Penderecki was developing a personal and thoroughly contrapuntal compositional style based on what was for him a new method: the use of twelve-tone serialism. My assertion is that a unified and pervasive organization of pitch, beyond Penderecki’s purely aesthetic intuition, does indeed exist in the Passion. At the heart of this organization is the structure of the work’s two twelve-tone rows, i.e. how the rows and subsets thereof “carve out” pitch-class space as they unfold in musical time, which proves to determine the intervallic content of the work’s seemingly disparate motivic elements despite the fact that few of these motives even partially constitute literal row segments. My study provides an explication of this relationship between the Passion’s twelve-tone rows and the work’s foreground material as well as analyses that address excerpts from the be-ginning, middle, and conclusion of the work. The composite image that these analyses reveal is that of a basic serial structure, extrapolated through various intervallic and graphic connections into a multitude of motives, the newly evident relationships among which form a narrative that interacts meaningfully with the passion story itself. Penderecki’s compositional ingenuity and originality are already well-known; what this study demonstrates is his consummate mastery of motivic organization and text setting, the acknowledgement of which is long overdue.