Triple Sharps, QntRelations, and Symmetries

A theoretical apparatus is offered to explain an important compositional practice developed by Nicolai Roslavets (1881–1944), one of the leading composers of early twentieth-century Soviet music. Several relevant studies of Roslavets’s harmonic language (Perle 1962, Ferenc 1993, Sitsky 1994) have discussed his use of synthetic chords (six to eight notes arranged as a scale-like succession of pitches with a fixed sequence of tones and semitones), but a number of its compositional implementations remain unexplored—namely, the use of transposed synthetic chords to create a sense of harmonic distance, and the potential for these transposed synthetic chords to produce extreme orthography. The extreme spellings that Roslavets uses (such as triple sharps) provide visual confirmation of the transpositional distances traversed by synthetic chords. Roslavets is particularly attracted to T5 and T7, transpositions reminiscent of the traditional tonal intervals of a perfect fourth and a perfect fifth. Using these two transpositions, Roslavets creates symmetrical chord-paths within clearly segmented formal sections of his compositions. A line of fifths is used to plot the transpositions of the synthetic chord, and quints are used to measure distances between fifths. The resulting chord-paths are classified according to three different types of symmetrical or near-symmetrical shapes: crisp symmetry, near-symmetry, and nested near-symmetry.