Anno 2013/2

Written in the style of novelist Dan Brown and using actual quotations from Puccini’s letters and other documents, the author creates the characters Prof. Segugio and her assistant Christie Hunter who explore Puccini’s compositional practices in the unfinished opera Turandot.

The article proposes an analysis of Fernando Lopes-Graça’s musical style (1906-1994), a Portuguese composer who played an important role in the resistance against Salazar’s dictatorship. His creative activity is characterized by a deep interest for the folk song tradition of his country and by a strong attitude towards the experimentation of new expressive languages.

Using as a case study the 1948 opera Il prigioniero, written over five years in Dallapiccola’s first phase of twelve-tone writing, I investigate the unique interweaving of the composer’s experimentation with the twelve-tone method, his setting of dramatic text, and his manipulation of the octatonic collection.

In France, during the eighteenth century, the history of the requiem intersects with a teleological concept of the art of dying that climaxed in the traumatic events of the 1789 Revolution. The paper investigates how the spirit of the Bourbon Restoration influenced the requiem in the post-revolutionary era and the progressive separation of the requiem from its characteristic liturgical function. 

In Josquin’s masses, two-part imitation is a regular feature of composition that can be found at various positions, most frequently in the Crucifixus, Pleni sunt coeli or Benedictus sections. Some of these imitative duos deserve special attention for their length and rigorousness, in particular when the two voices appear as a “never-ending canon” throughout a whole passage. 

Moving forward from the taxonomy presented by Pascal Decroupet in 1997, the intent of this paper is to introduce a new analytical tool applicable to aleatoric music. The principle underlying this tool – conceived as a didactic device – is the definition of the primary structural elements which define a piece of music as aleatoric.

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