Anno 2024/1

While many post-tonal languages, particularly those of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, depart from tonality, they never abandon musical logic based on voice-leading, i.e., linear progressions. Indeed, they maintain an emphasis on voice-leading, or goal-directed linear motion, as a means of creating structure, continuity and unity. As a result, it is possible, even absent a tonal framework, to perceive in many post-tonal works an underlying linear-contrapuntal structure and to hear and understand certain pitches and sonorities in a post-tonal work as structuring elements in conjunction with interrelated, linear, goal-directed virtual voices. 

Variety in music performance has been deemed a natural necessity on the part of practitioners [Godlovitch, 1988; Margulis, 2014; Smith, 1993]. In fact, a strive for variety has been noticed both in terms of performative patterns that vary throughout a given interpretation [Rink, Spiro, and Gold 2011] and across the multiple performances of a given piece [Fabian 2015; Fabian and Ornoy 2009; Llorens 2018; 2021b; Ornoy 2008]. 

This article attempts to link music theory to compositional practice from an innovative methodological standpoint. The original features of this approach can be found in the attempt to define a new paradigm in music composition. The author investigates if and how the harmony of Elliott Carter (1908–2012) — as systematised in his Harmony Book — can be the driver to explore novel compositional paths by testing the values of a “new humanistic” prospect through the decon- structionist approach.