A Methodology for the Discussion of Contour: Its Application to Schoenberg's "Music"

Accounts of continuity in tonal music have generally been accounts of pitch relations. This can be justified because of the gravitational power of the tonal center in defining cadences and because of the decisiveness of consonance-dissonance relations for hearing meter. For twentieth-century music, theories of pitch-class relations have attempted to play a similar role, reassuring all doubters that pitch class not only accounts for relations at the surface level, but is the only true source of deeper structural relations. Pitch-class relations, however, by their very nature, are incapable of exerting the same degree of control over the musical surface as could be attributed to pitch relations in tonal music. Whereas pitch relations are the bearers of linear continuity in tonal music via scale steps, pitch-class relations in post-tonal music, no matter how rigorously controlled, cannot make a comparable claim. We are confronted, then, with a serious gap between the vivid realities of the surface of twentieth-century music and our accounts of the rather remote abstractions that are supposed to be its prime determinants. Recent work on timbre, meter, and attack point relations has begun to remedy the one-sided pitch-class favoritism, but these parameters too often are relegated to the margins as surface phenomena. The radical music of the classical twelve-tone period most often has