ROBERT MORRIS

Compositional Theory, Musical Spaces, and Compositional Designs

Abstract

The twentieth-century has seen the rise of "compositional theory", a genre of musical research that is distinguished from other forms of music theory, such as that involved in pedagogy and musical analysis. In addition to the social and cultural factors that motivated this trend, was the realization that ordinary music notation and terminology were no longer adequate to describe and explain radical and/or revolutionary developments in new music ; this led to the application of modern mathematics to music structure.

In this paper I survey developments in compositional theory in both American and European music, focusing on research that has been inspired by the important and seminal work of Milton Babbitt.
 I make a few distinctions that help identity different orientations and purposes in the literature.
 I distinguish compositional theory from analytic theory (despite the fact, that there are important connections between the two, such as between Babbitt and David Lewin).
 Here I illustrate some problematic relationships between pitch and pitch-class structures.
 These considerations allow me to discuss aspects of the musical realization of "compositional designs", two-dimensional arrays of pitch-classes used in the planning and implementation of non-tonal compositions.
 Theories of relationships are different from theories of entities ; I unite them into the concept I call a "compositional space," which is related-but not equivalent-to Lewin's transformational networks.

Biography of Robert Morris