Lejaren Hiller - Twelve-Tone Variations for Piano

• Report rights infringement
• published: 21 Mar 2014
• views: 1523

Twelve-Tone Variations for Piano (1954) I. Theme II. Variations upon Individual Tone Rows III. Variations upon Two Tone Rows Combined IV. Variations upon Three Tone Rows Combined V. Variations upon Four and Six Tone Rows Combined Roger Shields, piano Twelve-Tone Variations shares with my String Quartet No. 5 of 1962 the dual characteristics of being composed according to serial techniques and being a full-scale set of variations. These are the only two compositions of mine that bear these two features in common though I have in numerous other works used variation form or have incorporated aspects of serial technique into compositions fundamentally based on other compositional premises. This composition is in five movements. The first movement, the Theme itself is brief. The "theme" as such is a combination of six tone-rows. This, right off, is a somewhat unusual feature of this work, since it is more usual to base a serial composition on one basic row and perhaps subsidiary rows derived from it. Here, however, these six rows bear no particular relationship to one another. Nevertheless, they are combined together to form a melodic phrase several bars long that constitutes the actual "theme," of the whole set of variations. The first movement, then, consists of four presentations of this theme, namely, itself, its retrograde, its retrograde inversion, and finally, its inversion. Note that it is the whole complex, not just the rows, that here undergoes the three classic permutations of serial writing. The remaining four movements are all variations derived from this basic material. The second movement consists of six variations, all rather short, that are based upon each of the six rows taken in turn. The third movement consists of three more complex and longer variations utilizing combinations of rows 1 and 2, rows 3 and 4, and rows 5 and 6, respectively. The fourth movement, extending this process, consists of only two variation sets based upon rows 1, 2, and 3 and on rows 4, 5, and 6 respectively. By now, however, each of these is a fully developed complex movement in itself. Finally, the last movement consists of four variations, based on rows 1, 2, 3, and 4, on all 6 rows, on rows 3, 4, 5 and 6 and again on all 6 rows, respectively. Actually, the first variation on all six rows is in effect a restatement of the first movement, the Theme; however, it is this Theme played more-or-less upside down and backwards, that is to say, as if the first page of the score had been rotated 180° on the music rack. The final variations that follow this are an extended fugue and coda. My remark about the restatement of the "Theme" reveals something of the freedom of the techniques applied throughout this composition. Although I have used all such standard techniques as inversion, retrogradation, retrogradation of inversion of both the rows and materials built from them, as well as building chords and other such structures from the rows, I have also not hesitated at all, to repeat notes freely in violation of the "classic rules," of devising novel techniques such as quadrature (90°) rotation, i.e., interchanging the pitch and time domains, of lining out the rows down a page of manuscript, across the systems, rather than only linearly, and so on. On the other hand, there is no use here of serialized rhythms, dynamics, and the like since these attributes of total serialism did not occur to me at the time. I should also point out that these variations are also much freer in form than the bulk of the classic variation literature. In variation structures by Beethoven, for instance, the harmonic plan, the phrase lengths, and really often the basic outline of the melody of the theme is normally rather closely adhered to. This is not at all the case here, not even in the earliest variations. --Lejaren Hiller Art by Keith Milow