Luigi Dallapiccola was an internationally recognized figure in Italian music during the middle decades of the twentieth century and left behind a body of work ranging from intimate miniatures to opera, from compositions for solo instrument to the large-scale music drama Ulisse. Starting in his late thirties, Dallapiccola embraced the compositional world of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, and most of his work from 1942 onwards is based, in one way or another, on twelve-note rows. Throughout this development Dallapiccola maintained a deep devotion to a kind of musical lyricism centred on the human voice, as well as a fine-tuned ear for subtly coloured orchestration. His work continues to deserve and receive attention from both performers and scholars.

Brian Alegant's new volume, The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola, is a welcome addition to studies of the composer, and it adds to our understanding of how his music connects to the various streams that flowed from the wellspring of Arnold Schoenberg's epochal insight, the ‘Method of Composing with Twelve Tones Which are Related Only with One Another’.Footnote ¹ The author circumscribes the book's subject in its title and further delimits its goals in the Introduction: the book ‘does not ask why Dallapiccola composed with twelve tones, but, rather, how he did’ (1). His purpose is to ‘trac[e] the evolution of [the composer's] praxis over a thirty-year period’ and, in doing so, to ‘highlight facets of his music that have not been previously discussed, and shed light on compositions that have been virtually ignored’ (2). Alegant is equally clear about what the book does not do: ‘It does not talk about the preserial compositions at all, and it touches only briefly on many other works’ (2). And while clearly recognizing the value of a range of additional topics – historical, musicological, and philosophical – the author is happy to leave these to others. Again in the author's words, ‘[W]hat is missing in the state of Dallapiccola research is an analytical and theoretical framework for his music, in particular the middle- and late-period works’ (2).

The particularity of focus is welcome, and the reader is thus prepared to supplement the volume with some additional information about the composer and his œuvre, but it would have been useful to have had a somewhat more detailed and complete list of compositions than that found on page 11, with the dates of compositions (rather than merely the years of a given compositional period) and perhaps a word or two about the nature of each work. I had to look outside the volume to come up with any description at all of the music drama Job. And while specific works are sometimes given dates of composition and descriptions in the text, this is not consistent throughout.

A certain amount of preparation for reading the volume is also required on account of its use of pitch-class set theory and twelve-note theory, but that is to be expected, and the book's emphasis is gratifyingly weighted in favour of analysis rather than abstract theory. This is another strength: the author is willing to take on a great deal beyond those aspects of the music that emphasize pitch structures, delving into issues of rhythm, timbre, gestural shaping, and text-setting, to mention but a few. And he is happy to tip his hand with regard to his deep affinity for this music. His analysis is not dispassionate, but is frequently offered as advocacy for works he feels are less well known than they should be.

The book is organized into seven chapters, framed by an Introduction and an Afterword. It is supplemented by copious notes, a selected bibliography, and an extensive index. Each chapter is well illustrated with thoughtfully laid out figures and examples, including comprehensive reductions of scores in the more extended analyses. The seven chapters fall into two large sections, the first four chapters covering what the author has identified as four distinct compositional periods in Dallapiccola's use of twelve-note techniques, and the last three dealing with a topic and two pieces in more detail. The topic – the presence, in various ways, of octatonicism in Dallapiccola's twelve-note music – invokes a number of compositions, while the remaining chapters offer close readings of An Mathilde and Parole di San Paolo. That these two works are less familiar than, say, the Variations for Orchestra or Il prigioniero is precisely the author's point, though with the advent of the internet it is now possible to find recordings of at least sections of these pieces posted online.

Alegant's division of Dallapiccola's twelve-note music into four periods depends to a degree on remarks made by the composer himself, but also on the presence of different compositional techniques in the works of each period. Most of these techniques involve the deployment of twelve-note rows, but some deal with other facets of the music. Among the former are what the author identifies as ‘cross partitions’, axial symmetry, linear presentations, various kinds of segmental and non-segmental invariance relations, trichordal derivation, and four-part arrays. Among the latter are ‘floating rhythm’ (a term derived from Dallapiccola's own writings), ideograms, leitrhythms, and what the author calls ‘rhythmicized Klangfarbenmelodie’. Each of these ideas, along with others, is introduced and illustrated in the course of the opening chapters.

The author has chosen to trace the arc of Dallapiccola's evolving twelve-note practice over the course of his career in terms of a kind of continuum between the techniques of Webern on the one hand and those of Schoenberg on the other. This juxtaposition can be persuasive: to distinguish Webern's twelve-note practice from Schoenberg's on the basis, respectively, of even and odd axes of inversional symmetry (10, Figure 1.1) is an elegant shorthand that sums up a raft of differences in the sound of their music. The author acknowledges that it is to a degree an artificial distinction, in that there are abundant examples in Webern and Schoenberg of each other's characteristics. Nonetheless, as a way of framing Dallapiccola's development as a twelve-note composer, I find that this approach sheds some useful light, as long as one understands the author's construction of ‘Webern’ and ‘Schoenberg’ as standing for categories of contrasting techniques. But things can shift in a problematic direction when the discussion turns to questions of influence. To equate the use of a technique associated with a predecessor with that person's influence is not necessarily justified: many aspects of twelve-note composition are obvious enough to be reinvented time and again. Moreover, once issues of influence are introduced, it is important to look at the full range of music that Dallapiccola might have come into contact with. For example, the composer's use of distinct but related twelve-note orderings in Ulisse raises the question of his possible acquaintance with Lulu, with its use of multiple, mutually derived rows. Similarly, a reference to Schoenberg's employment of the hexachord type found in Ulisse might prompt mention of his use of it in his own unfinished opera, Moses und Aron. Further, while it is reasonable to invoke the early serialists as a source for ‘rhythmicized Klangfarbenmelodie’, it might be worth pointing out that this idea appears prominently in Wozzeck, in the famous B natural interlude, in which an orchestrated crescendo on that note is composed out using the following scene's Hauptrhythmus.

But issues of influence, although touched on and often argued, are not central to the author's primary task, which is the limning of Dallapiccola's progress of a method, and this is done with insight and dexterity. Among several techniques that Alegant identifies is the basic concept theorized under the term ‘cross partitions’. Essentially, a cross partition presents a twelve-note row as a two-dimensional array. The row is partitioned segmentally into parts of equal size (two hexachords, three tetrachords, four trichords, or six dyads). Realized in time, these could represent a series of simultaneities or block chords. This is in essence a partial ordering: each collection as a whole is ordered with regard to the others in time, but the order of each collection's constituent elements, the pitch classes, is not manifested in time. However, their registral ordering may or may not follow their row-determined order, and this is where interesting things may emerge. To stick with a reasonably concrete example, four trichords, arranged as a sequence of four block chords, will manifest ordered sequences that may be traced in various ways, by means of register, articulation, dynamics, instrument, and so on. In its simplest manifestation we can think of a cross partition as a series of four three-note chords, whose top edges, bottom edges, and middles each produce one ordered sequence of four notes. I am strenuously avoiding language like ‘voice’ or ‘part’ here in order to emphasize that, while there is a similarity to concepts from tonal voice leading in these cross partitions, they have their own entirely self-contained conditions and limitations outside of tonal practice. These resulting sequences of pitch classes, derived from non-adjacent pitch classes of the cross partition's underlying row, may act as motivically significant events on a composition's musical surface. They may or may not represent collections of the same type found in the ordered segments of the row, and they offer the same kinds of opportunities for collectional association, complementation, and so forth that help to knit a twelve-note composition together.

Alegant has theorized the contingencies of cross partitions elsewhere,Footnote ² and offers useful references; he also provides enough insight into their properties to give his analyses a solid grounding. Some of the most persuasive aspects of his analysis of the Parole di San Paolo arise from his observations of the interactions of collections derived from cross partitions and collections of the same type found segmentally in the work's row. His examples make it clear that these are not merely theoretical constructs, but are palpably projected on the musical surface so that they become part of one's aural experience of the piece.

Two more aspects of Alegant's treatment of cross partitions are worth noting, the second of which has useful implications for his analytical stance throughout. First, he is careful to note that the realizations of cross partitions need not be limited to the brief description noted above. For example, one might rotate a cross partition by ninety degrees, so that the segments that unfold in time might themselves be ordered segments of the row, while the resulting simultaneities (the chords) would represent non-segmental extractions from the underlying row. But more important to his larger argument is his second observation, which concerns the way Dallapiccola's use of this particular technique might become the rhetoric whereby we understand a composition's unfolding of itself. Alegant points to the composer's own discussion of character development in novels of Joyce and Proust, and his association of the gradual emergence of a literary character with the gradual unveiling of the total ordering of a twelve-note row.

Alegant's embrace of figurative language to connect the more formal aspects of his work with the heard effects of a composition is one of the great strengths of these analyses. Given that so much of Dallapiccola's music is based on texts, it is worth noting that the author is also for the most part concerned with how the music shapes and is shaped by the sung words, and in the longer analytical essays he provides us with translations and commentary on how the meaning of a line or a passage can influence the kinds of twelve-note structures used to shape the music. Occasionally, especially in the earlier chapters that outline some of these techniques, I would have liked a bit more detail on the texts being set, or in the case of Il prigioniero a brief synopsis of the action. But there are still gems to appreciate here: Alegant's analysis of Preghiere, while offered primarily with regard to its technical developments, includes the observation that the melodic line used to support a supplication to the Son of God (‘Tu, che sei il vero figlio di Dio’) had been previously heard setting ‘Chiara speranza’.

One of the more intriguing sections of the book is Chapter 5, an examination of the presence of features of octatonicism in Dallapiccola's twelve-note compositions. Alegant does more than simply note-pick those passages that might fit into an octatonic scale. He spends some time contemplating how one might think about an intersection of octatonicism with the total chromatic, and looks at a variety of passages in which the hexachords present on the musical surface are subsets of the octatonic collection. Most persuasive to me are those analytical vignettes that track the presence of significant octatonic segments over longer stretches of music or show how the combinations of different strands of the musical surface form larger collections consistent with the octatonic collection. What to me lends this greater credence than might otherwise have been the case can be found in some of the composer's earlier music. One of the most significant works Dallapiccola completed prior to his twelve-note period is the choral composition Canti di prigionia, which contains striking passages of octatonicism, along with melodic lines that encompass all twelve pitch classes. Alegant reads these latter not so much as twelve-note rows but as motivic material that encompasses the full chromatic appearing in music that is predominantly scale-based. Thus it seems completely appropriate to consider some of Dallapiccola's subsequent music as twelve-note, but exhibiting motivic material that is recognizably octatonic. There is more here to be explored: some of the trichordal/hexachordal mosaics discussed in this chapter and elsewhere have intersections with the hexatonic world of triads related by semitone voice leading, with its [014589] hexachords – see, for example, the triads sung by the chorus in Example 5.12, taken from bars 823–9 of Il prigioniero (136), as well as the charts derived from Parole di San Paolo in Figure 7.5 (253). But that must await another occasion for a closer look. This is one of a number of doors to future work that the volume opens up.

A few hindrances to a reading of the text should be mentioned. Some are mechanical: there are quite a few errors in the text and figures, such as the reversal of tetrachordal labels of the opening chords of Il prigioniero (132), or the chart of rows with octatonic subsets (115), which contains an incomplete row for Preghiere, as well as a row with a duplicate pitch class for Job. This last leads to an impossibility in the text on page 114 (‘Hence, the row for Job features an isolated pitch class, a complete [octatonic] collection, and a member of 3-7[025]’).

Some issues also arise from the way the author chooses to articulate technical points. Alegant has adopted what is in many ways a standard form of labelling rows, and one that matches what he has observed in Dallapiccola's sketches, in which each row is labelled P, I, R, or RI, and a number is appended to indicate the first pitch class (or the last in the case of rows labelled R or RI). While this is common practice, I think it is worth pointing out that this labelling system implies a hierarchy among rows related by T, I, and R that does not exist prior to their use in a composition. Frequently enough ‘P’ is determined by the first row encountered in a work, with all following from that, but just as the first chord in a tonal composition may or may not be the tonic, so the first row in a twelve-note work may or may not be the best central reference point for the piece. In fact, often it is not a single row but rather a set of rows, or a hexachordal area, or an axis of inversion that plays the role of a point of reference. I and others have found it far more useful to give rows arbitrary names, but then to track the operations that relate them.Footnote ³ While it is easy enough to translate the author's labels into networks of relations, doing so frequently reveals parallelisms of structure that it would have been useful to have had noted in the text.

Occasionally there seem to be actual conceptual problems in the theory. In his discussion of Prieghiere the author notes correctly that the row <1 0 3 4 9 t 8 7 2 6 5 e> may be inverted at index number 1 (I₁, or T₁I, depending on one's notational convention), yielding <0 1 t 9 4 3 5 6 e 7 8 2>, which preserves the contents of each discrete segmental hexachord. He also observes that this groups the forty-eight forms of the row into twelve regions, each containing four rows that share hexachordal content. But he discusses this as ‘an idiosyncratic application of the quintessential Schoenbergian procedure: hexachordal inversional combinatoriality’ (90). Strictly speaking, this stands at quite a distance from Schoenberg's practice, though the fact that the two hexachords map onto themselves under inversion allows the generation of twelve regions analogous to the twelve hexachordal regions associated with Schoenberg's practice. But the differences are significant: first, hexachordal inversional combinatoriality is usually understood to represent the situation in which a row's hexachords may be inverted onto each other's pitch-class content. A row containing the hexachordal contents A and B would invert onto one with hexachordal contents B and A. This both allows the sharing of the two ordering patterns with both sets of pitch classes and creates the opportunity for constructing aggregates by pairing first the initial hexachords of each row, then the second hexachords. What Dallapiccola's row would permit would be the pairing of the inversion of a row's second hexachord with its own first hexachord – a practice usually called RI combinatoriality and not generally associated with Schoenberg. Furthermore, at least in the excerpt illustrated, Dallapiccola never combines rows to create aggregates from their constituent hexachords. What Alegant is tracing here is an interesting set of invariance relations among note rows, and this is indeed something one might readily associate with Schoenberg's practice, but to call it even an idiosyncratic application thereof seems to skim over too much.

Despite these last issues there is much to be gained from this volume, and any musician curious about Dallapiccola would benefit from it. There is always more to be said: many of Alegant's examples contain enticing threads to be pulled, and there are vast spans of music still to be engaged. But what is covered here cannot but help to whet the appetite for anyone interested in one of the most lyrically engaging composers of the past seventy years.