Weinzweig: Essays on His Life and Music

6. The First Canadian Serialist

131 Chapter 6 The First Canadian Serialist catherine nolan Introduction John Weinzweig’s interest in serialism was awakened in 1937–8 while he pursued his master’s degree at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Eastman was a primary North American centre for the creation and performance of new music under the leadership of the charismatic Howard Hanson, to whom Weinzweig had introduced himself earlier in Toronto when Hanson was there on a conducting engagement.1 The year at Eastman turned into a watershed for the young Weinzweig by igniting his commitment to musical modernism and providing him with opportunities unavailable in Toronto. He was able to attend concerts of contemporary European and US music, and through the voluminous resources of the Sibley Music Library had access to scores of contemporary masters including Stravinsky, Bartók, Schoenberg, and Berg. Paradoxically, despite Eastman’s central position in the creation and performance of modern music, serialism was not encouraged by its composition faculty at the time.2 Weinzweig reaped far more from Eastman than the school was formally able to offer because of his initiative, motivation, and energy. It was only upon his return to Toronto following the completion of his master’s degree that Weinzweig assiduously took up the study of serial techniques on his own. As is frequently reported, the Lyric Suite for string quartet by Alban Berg, which Weinzweig discovered while at Eastman, profoundly influenced the direction of his serial practice. Weinzweig’s personal copy of the score of the Lyric Suite includes annotations indicating alterations of the normative row ordering of pitches and of motivic relationships, specific techniques of Berg’s 132 the composer serial practice that attracted his attention and that he implemented in his own music.3 At the opening of the third movement, for example,Weinzweig writes “variants of 4-note figure,”and enumerates the three reorderings of the (variant ) row’s first tetrachord, B -A-F-B! in all parts.4 Some of Weinzweig’s annotations, including identification of row statements and basic serial relations , indications of musical processes such as sequence or stretto, translations of German terms, and circling the quotation of the“Tristan”chord in the sixth movement (bars 26–27) appear to have been written while Weinzweig was still in his formative years. Others seem to have been written somewhat later.Across from the first page of the score, for example, appear handwritten references to some abstract features of the Lyric Suite’s principal row: its cyclic properties, its all-interval construction, and the symmetry of inversionally related intervals around the midpoint of the row. On the same page,Weinzweig further identifies the row as being based on one of Josef Matthias Hauer’s hexachordal tropes: C D E F G A/F G A B C D (whose hexachords belong to the diatonic set class 6-32 [024579]).5 Each of Hauer’s forty-four tropes consists of a pair of complementary hexachords in which the ordering of notes in each hexachord is not fixed, and Weinzweig’s rather free approach to ordering within row segments suggests an affinity with Hauer’s conception of tropes. The annotations on his score of the Lyric Suite attest to Weinzweig’s dedication to learning and to his continuously deepening understanding of the resources of serialism. Another important source of inspiration for the young Weinzweig was Ernst Krenek’s Studies in Counterpoint Based on the Twelve-Tone Technique, which Weinzweig acquired soon after its publication in 1940.6 Krenek’s Studies in Counterpoint, published just two years after its author’s emigration from Europe, was the first practical guide to twelve-tone composition (in English or German) and provided Weinzweig’s first formal instruction in serialism. Weinzweig himself published a short article entitled“The New Music”in 1942 which echoes principles of Krenek’s book and situates the appeal of serialism within a larger context of innovations in form, such as the abandonment of literal repetition and reprise. Weinzweig wrote: The original succession of intervals is called the“tone-row”or series, out of which all the individual elements of the composition are to be developed … This results in a homogeneous work the texture of which is woven by the multitudinous transformations of the tone-row.7 Form, too, has undergone a house-cleaning of endless repetitions and lengthy recapitulations.8 Like Krenek, Weinzweig understood the row to be...