JAVS Spring 2010

Figure 3. Opening four bars of the Sonata for Viola. Krenek’s use of open strings makes his writing for the viola res onant and effective. (All excerpts from the solo viola sonata: Ernst Krenek, Sonate für Viola, op. 92/3© Copyright 2009 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/UE 34941. Used with permission.)

ments are deployed in their most concise and lucid form. Dance elements appear, sometimes for only a bar, and then disappear into an anachronistic atonal fog, only to reappear in another form later in the work. The twelve-tone row is presented and spread out temporally through the interjection of a linear ref erence pitch “D,” which the row alternates between as it ascends through the required pitches of the series (fig. 3). The effect is Baroque in appearance and texture while simultaneously satisfying a modern function as well. Krenek uses this technique of series interruption throughout the first movement and exploits a freedom with his handling of the individual pitches of the series. The outcome is both refreshing and characteris tic of his compositional process. At times the rhythm is retained from the original row while other pitches are abandoned, then interrupted, then, as if enclosed in a giant set of parentheses, re-started in an altered form. The dialogue that ensues is one of linear versus vertical and has many sonic resemblances to the six teenth century, most specifically Ockeghem—a com poser whom Krenek deeply admired—more than it does to his immediate contemporaries: Hindemith, Webern, and Schoenberg. Krenek’s unique solution to polyphony, on a basically monophonic instrument, is to not suffocate the instrument’s rich and haunting quality with cumbersome over-orchestration, such as

difficult-to-execute double and triple stops in quick tempi. Krenek, rather, creates a controlled and system atic usage for double stops, reserving the more difficult multi-note surfaces for the slower second movement. The free atonal style, which uses elements of the twelve-tone series in this work, has its origins in pre compositional justification. A strict twelve-tone idiom requires each row to be related back to the original series through a hierarchy. In a more free atonal vocab ulary, where dodecaphonic elements contribute to motivic development, the precompositional creation of sets prevails. Here, practical application offers a more structural function and component of spontaneity. The ingenuity is not in the interplay of the various incarnations of the sets, but rather in the distinctive contributions that the sets make to the motivic evolu tion of the work. Krenek accomplishes this through the creation of a hybrid twelve-tone system that would aim to rectify some of the eccentric qualities of the more customary strict twelve-tone system. Krenek’s solution to this was to partial the row of twelve pitches into two sets of six-tone rows; each containing a series of intervals that is closely parallel but not identical. To this series he then employed what he called “row rota tion,” as discussed in the Sonatina for Flute and Viola, by which the first note of each six-tone row moves to the end, thus creating two new six-tone rows and a new twelve-tone row as well. The first row of the work

Figure 4. The top stave is the original row seen in its partialized form and the bottom stave is the original row in its first rotation, arrows point to the progression of the first tones as they rotate into the new series.

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