Metamorphosing: The Construction and Deconstruction of Roberto Gerhard’s Symphony No. 2

There are three structural methods, which can be summarised from Gerhard’s paper “Developments in twelve-tone technique”, that employ the series (or its derivative time-set): to fix the length of the rhythmic articulation of individual pitches; to control the ordering of the twelve transpositions of a series so each is presented once before a transposition is repeated; finally, to determine the duration of these transpositions. The series, therefore, has the ability to govern microcosmic and macrocosmic parameters of a composition. All three of these can be found in Roberto Gerhard’s Second Symphony (1957-59). On revising the Symphony in 1967-68 to create Metamorphoses he reworks the material of the original ‘the changes - from slight to complete - take place on all levels: in the writing, in the orchestration, in the ordering, in the disordering (...)’ In the process of recomposing Gerhard, at times, seems to deliberately disregard the methodology he imposed on himself in the earlier version. The aim of this chapter is to investigate how much he ignores this on revising the Symphony; how the changes he made impact on the coherence of the newer version; finally to make some suggestions as to why he felt the structures could be broken.

Citation

Sproston, D. (2016). Metamorphosing: The Construction and Deconstruction of Roberto Gerhard’s Symphony No. 2. In Adkins, M. & Russ, M. (Eds), Essays on Roberto Gerhard. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Publisher

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10034/620667

Type

Book chapter

Language

en

Description

This is a chapter (final draft pre publication) which can be found in the book 'Essays on Roberto Gerhard' edited by Monty Adkins and Mike Russ.

ISBN

9781443811088

Additional Links

http://www.cambridgescholars.com/essays-on-roberto-gerhard