Rhetoric and Resistance in the Music of Elliott Carter

This paper investigated links between surface and deep structures in Elliott Carter's 1980 piece for solo piano, Night Fantasies. A specific harmonic structure, comprised of 12-note all-interval chords, was described in detail. At the same time, the rhetoric of the music's surface was investigated, and the roles of fast and slow layers of music in effecting a background/foreground shift were discussed. Carter's ideas about serialism were reviewed in order to understand the composer's own aesthetic in the application of abstract ordering systems. The investigation concludes that neither rhetoric nor the harmonic deep structure dominates the other; rather, the interaction of the rhetorical surface and the deep structure was found to be the essential characterizing feature of the piece.

Name thesis:degree_name

D.M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Music

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• McManus, James Michael

• Music

Identifier

(UMI)AAI8908775

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/70870