Reconciling Order and Content and Their Unification in Scherzo for Piano by Charles Wuorinen

RECONCILING ORDER AND CONTENT AND THEIR UNIFICATION IN SCHERZO FOR PIANO BY CHARLES WUORINEN CIRO SCOTTO HARLES WUORINEN’S CONCEPTION OF THE STRUCTURE of the twelvetone system and its relationship to the tonal system has most certainly changed since the publication of Simple Composition in 1979. Nevertheless, aspects of the system’s structure presented in his seminal publication still provide viable insights for constructing a framework for analyzing his music, especially with regard to the structural function of order and content in his compositions and the incorporation of tonal structures into a twelve-tone system: But while the tonal system, in an atrophied or vestigial form, is still used today in popular and commercial music, and even occasionally in the works of backward-looking serious composers, it is no longer employed by serious composers of the mainstream . . . . If the principle of ordered interval succession becomes a sufficiently generalized generator of form, then . . . the principle of pitch organization derived from interval content . . . can be reintroduced into what is basically order-determined music. . . . C 268 Perspectives of New Music Perhaps in the future we shall hear a reconciliation of the two principles of pitch organization, content and order—or rather their unification in a superior whole.1 The description of the twelve-tone and tonal systems as either order or content determined originated with Milton Babbitt.2 In Wuorinen’s discussion of order- and content-dependent systems, each system apparently gives rise to mutually exclusive methods of generating system-defining pitch-class relationships that perhaps can be reconciled in a higher-level system. This systemic division might also suggest that a dichotomy exists between the systems, and that compositional techniques determined by the twelve-tone system would be unavailable to the tonal system, and vice versa. While Wuorinen considered serialism the only viable compositional technique for modern composers, suggesting that content determined compositional techniques would be unavailable to him, his conjecture about unifying content with order in a single system indicates that he also rejected any order/content dichotomy. In fact, hexachordal combinatoriality and its ancillary concept of hexachordal areas demonstrates the falsity of the dichotomy since the technique of generating a combinatorial row pair incorporates elements of both order and content. Despite the false dichotomy, reconciling the two principles of pitch organization and the incorporation of tonal structures into the twelvetone system has profoundly influenced the architecture of some of Wuorinen’s compositions. Through an analysis of the opening and closing sections of his Scherzo for Piano (2007), this article will demonstrate several of the structures and techniques in the composition that unify content and order as well as reconcile twelve-tone and tonal structures. Several analysts have already laid the groundwork for exploring the reconciliation of the principles of order and content and the incorporation of aspects of the tonal structure into the twelve-tone system in Wuorinen’s early music. Louis Karchin, for example, examines pitch-centricity and its role in the formal organization of Wuorinen’s chamber composition Speculum Speculi (1972), a serial work that employs a twelve-tone row and incorporates pitch centricity not only as a means of defining formal divisions within the work, but also as a means of bringing back aspects of tonal structure that were abandoned when the composers’ focus switched to order as a means of organization rather than content.3 My analysis will expand Karchin’s work into new territory. Specifically, the analysis will demonstrate how syntactic relationships derived from set-class (SC) and transformational structures change pitch-class centricity from a local phenomenon into a functional analog of global tonal syntactic relationships in Scherzo for Piano.4 Reconciling Order and Content and Their Unification 269 Jeffrey Kresky also considers the effect that an interest in “a reconciliation of the general twelve-tone way with the tonal past” has had on Wuorinen’s compositions.5 Kresky’s study traces the gradual stylistic changes found in the surface features of earlier compositions. He remarks on the change from the “fierce, quite forbidding severity in all domains” of Wuorinen’s early work to the “accessibility . . . offered in all dimensions” and the reduction of “surface disorder to order” of later pieces, noting in...