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Brian Alegant, The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola

The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola is the first book to examine the Italian composer’s twelve-tone praxis from the perspective of posttonal theory. Brian Alegant discusses more than half of Dallapiccola’s twelve-tone compositions in varying degrees of detail in the course of four article-length studies. The longest of these, “Dallapiccola’s Serial Odyssey,” comprises Part 1 of the book, four chapters laying out an evolutionary heuristic for Dallapiccola’s twelve-tone music based on Webernian or Schoenbergian features—for instance, derivation and linear row presentation vis-à-vis hexachordal structuring and unordered presentation. Selected movements or passages illustrate a four-phase periodization of the works aimed at documenting “the slow shift in Dallapiccola’s musical language from a ‘Webernian’ conception to a ‘Schoenbergian’ one” (p. 3). Part 2 comprises three chapters with detailed studies of octatonicism and two individual compositions, the cantata An Mathilde (1955), and Parole di San Paolo (1964). All three chapters are major contributions to the analytical literature: the latter two are the most exhaustively detailed and clearly presented technical explications available of individual Dallapiccola compositions. Throughout the book the music examples are exemplary, and include all of An Mathilde and Parole di San Paolo in annotated reduced scores. “Much has been written about Dallapiccola’s acquisition of the twelvetone technique,” Part 1 begins (p. 9), but this book excludes the preserial compositions such as Canti di Prigionia. A “bipolar” approach may be understandable because theorists think of twelve-tone technique in Schoenbergian or Webernian terms, but it leads to considerable quasihistorical speculation—such as locating the fons et origo of Dallapiccola’s “soundscapes” in Webern’s Das Augenlicht—that might be tempered by