From their compositional and philosophical perspectives, the works of Elliott Carter and Luigi Nono share very little in common. Carter, a true American modernist, strongly opposed the method of twelve-tone music, which was becoming prevalent and practically unavoidable in the 1950s Europe and US. Devising his own harmonic language based on all-interval tetrachords, he sought to distance himself from the growing trend of serialism. Nono, a European avant-garde composer associated with the Darmstadt School, embraced the twelve- tone method, also looking for ways to distance himself from yet another style sweeping the US during the same period—chance and aleatoric music. Despite their opposing views on the aesthetic and applicability of twelve-tone music, the two composers shared their admiration for the works of the Second Viennese School. In this paper, I examine Carter’s 1957 and Nono’s 1956 analyses of Schoenberg’s pivotal twelve-tone work: Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 (1926-1928). Completed only a year apart, the analyses take a different approach on the piece at hand, hence showing how both composers understood Schoenberg’s construction of combinatorial rows, and which particular techniques of the method each found applicable to their own works. Thus, these analyses, combined with sketches housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung and Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono, not only shed light on Schoenberg’s system, but also become a valuable tool for tracking both Carter’s and Nono’s compositional processes.

Despite Carter’s public decry of the twelve-tone method, Schoenberg’s Variations left a profound impact on him. Months after hearing the performance of the piece in 1955, Carter completed his own Variations for Orchestra, closely following Schoenberg’s form of Introduction-Theme-nine variations-Finale. Further, although not twelve-tone music, Carter’s Theme contains two twelve-note sequences. In his 1960 essay, “Shop Talk by an American Composer,” Carter explains that he studied the important twelve-tone works, many of which he admired, “out of interest and out of professional responsibility” (219-220). However, Carter disassociated himself from twelve-tone practice early on, finding the system inapplicable to what he was trying to do. While he did explore the compositional possibilities within this method and had no objections in principle towards the use of the system, he never submitted to the serialist mentality. Carter’s theoretical foundation and compositional practice differed distinctively from that of his contemporaries of the Darmstadt School—Boulez, Stockhausen, Maderna, and Nono—who were primarily interested in the twelve-tone system, and used the music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern as an immediate point of departure for their own music (Meyer, 14). Instead, Carter was interested in the expressive content of twelve-tone music.

Carter’s more intimate familiarity with Schoenberg’s work is revealed in his 1957 lecture on the piece, Carter’s only written analysis of a Second Viennese School work. Although Schoenberg introduced the last of his mature techniques of the twelve-tone method in his Variations and realized how to integrate them into a comprehensive musical system (Haimo 1990, 149), Carter’s seems to demonstrate only a basic understanding of that system. He focuses on the principal row forms and transformations and explains the I-combinatorial property of the row in general terms: “the first 6 tones of the inversion of the row, when transposed down a minor third, constitute a new ordering of the original row” (Meyer, 143). This “layman” analysis of the piece would suggest that Carter did not completely understand the full potential of the method. However, his sketches demonstrate the opposite. For instance, in a sketch outlining the harmonic design of the Second String Quartet (1959), Carter derives (012678) all-combinatorial hexachord from the two forms of (016) “Viennese” trichord. Carter explores both the symmetry of the hexachord, by working with trichordal subsets, and the special combinatorial transformations of (012678) to complete the aggregate. Hence, the striking importance of Carter’s analysis and these sketches is in that they reveal how Carter applied the ideas of the twelve-tone method in his works of the 1950s, a period during which he greatly struggled to develop his own harmonic expression.

In stark contrast to Carter’s general analysis of the work, Nono’s technical study supplements Schoenberg’s own 1931 lecture on the Variations. Closely examining Nono’s 1956 essay and his annotated score analysis, it becomes evident that Nono was drawn to Schoenberg’s structural logic of the system, which greatly guided his compositional process. Nono’s annotated score not only tracks the transformations of the row and the “BACH” motive, but also the distinct rhythmic cells throughout the variations. That Schoenberg’s harmonic and rhythmic treatment influenced Nono is quite clear: for instance, his 1950 work, Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell'op. 41 di A. Schönberg, is based on twelve-tone series of Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, Op. 41. This series is derived from the transformation of all-combinatorial hexachord (014589). In addition to exploiting the properties of this special hexachord, Nono also rotates his rhythmic units in the fourth movement, the “Allegro violento,” tying them directly to particular dyads of the sequence (Iddon, 39-40). Thus, Nono’s analysis of Schoenberg allows us to realize what specific methods Nono pursued and developed as the basis of his own system.

Composers seldom offer technical analyses of their own music. However, when they do analyze other composers’ works, it gives a chance to examine their own compositional development. In this case, having one same work analyzed by two composers with opposing aesthetics—Elliott Carter and Lugi Nono—gives us an extraordinary possibility to understand how both composers, in their quest to establish their own identifying voice, found the common ground in Schoenberg’s method, yet used it as a means to achieve different goals.