List of Quartal Pieces - History - 20th- and 21st-century Classical Music

20th- and 21st-century Classical Music

Composers who use the techniques of quartal harmony include Claude Debussy, Francis Poulenc, Alexander Scriabin, Alban Berg, Leonard Bernstein, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Anton Webern (Herder 1987, 78) Arnold Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony Op. 9 (1906) displays quartal harmony. The work begins not from tonal harmony, but instead begins with a fictitious tonal-centre: the first measures construct a five-part fourth chord with the notes C – F – B♭ – E♭ – A♭ distributed over several instruments. The composer then picks out this vertical quartal harmony in a horizontal sequence of fourths from the horns, eventually leading to a passage of triadic quartal harmony (i.e., chords of three notes, each layer a fourth apart).

Schoenberg was also one of the first to write on the theoretical consequences of this harmonic innovation. In his Theory of Harmony (Harmonielehre) of 1911 (Schoenberg 1911,) he wrote: "The quartal construction of chords can lead to a chord containing all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, and with that comes a possibility for the systematic use of those harmonic phenomena that have already been obtained in some recent works having seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve-part chords... The quartal construction allows... the accommodation of all possible phenomena of harmony". Other examples of quartal harmony appear in Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 1.

For Anton Webern, the importance of quartal harmony lay in the possibility of building new sounds. In 1912, he wrote, "With alteration the fourth-chord never need belong to tonal harmony, but can be free of all tonal relationships." After hearing Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, Webern wrote "You must write something like that, too!" (The Path to the New Music, p.48. "So was mußt du auch machen!") Shortly after, he wrote his Four Pieces for Violin and Piano Op. 7, using quartal harmony as a formal principle, which was also used in later works.

Uninfluenced by the theoretical and practical work of the Second Viennese School, the American Charles Ives meanwhile wrote in 1906 a song called "The Cage" (No. 64 of his collection, 114 songs), in which the piano part contained four-part fourth chords accompanying a vocal line which moves in whole tones.

Other 20th-century composers, like Béla Bartók with his piano work Mikrokosmos and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, as well as Paul Hindemith, Carl Orff and Igor Stravinsky, employed quartal harmony in their work. These composers joined Romantic elements with Baroque music, folk songs and their peculiar rhythm and harmony with the open harmony of fourths and fifths.

Hindemith constructed large parts of his symphonic work Symphony: Mathis der Maler by means of fourth and fifth intervals. These steps are a restructuring of fourth chords (C – D – G becomes the fourth chord D – G – C), or other mixtures of fourths and fifths (D♯ – A♯ – D♯ – G♯ – C♯ in measure 3 of the example). Hindemith was, however, not a proponent of an explicit quartal harmony. In his 1937 writing Unterweisung im Tonsatz (The Craft of Musical Composition, Hindemith 1937), he wrote that "notes have a family of relationships, that are the bindings of tonality, in which the ranking of intervals is unambiguous," so much so, indeed, that in the art of triadic composition "...the musician is bound by this, as the painter to his primary colours, the architect to the three dimensions." He lined up the harmonic and melodic aspects of music in a row in which the octave ranks first, then the fifth and the third, and then the fourth. "The strongest and most unique harmonic interval after the octave is the fifth, the prettiest nevertheless is the third by right of the chordal effects of its Combination tones."

In his Theory of Harmony (Schoenberg 1978, 407): "Besides myself my students Dr. Anton Webern and Alban Berg have written these harmonies (fourth chords), but also the Hungarian Béla Bartók or the Viennese Franz Schreker, who both go a similar way to Debussy, Dukas and perhaps also Puccini, are not far off.

British composer Michael Tippett also employed quartal harmonies extensively in works from his middle period. Examples are his Piano Concerto and the opera The Midsummer Marriage. An almost constant quartal harmony is used by Bertold Hummel in his Second Symphony of 1966. A similarly obvious example is the work of Mieczysław Weinberg. Hermann Schroeder alternated in his works using fragments of Gregorian Chant between quintal and quartal harmony. Also the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski devised a use that allows many harmonic combinations to be applied to a single part, having several combinations that may be tried against it, like fourths with whole tones, tritones with semitones, or other possibilities.

In the first movement of Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie, a six-note combination is constructed in pieces from fourths and tritones, much like in the music of Schoenberg and Scriabin. Much of Messiaen's work applies quartal harmony, moderated by his development of what he called "Modes of limited transposition".

A preference for quartal harmony is present in the works of Leo Brouwer (10 Etudes for Guitar), Robert Delanoff (Zwiegespräche für Orgel), Ivan Vïshnegradsky, Tōru Takemitsu (Cross Hatch) and Hanns Eisler (Hollywood-Elegy). In the 1960s, the use of tone clusters juxtaposing minor and major seconds pushed aside quartal harmony somewhat. The orchestral work of György Ligeti, Atmosphères of 1961, makes extensive use of such sounds.

As a transition to the history of jazz, George Gershwin may be mentioned. In the first movement of his Concerto in F altered fourth chords descend chromatically in the right hand with a chromatic scale leading upward in the left hand.