Partition Lattices in Twelve-Tone Music: An Introduction

Author: Laurel Parsons

Publication details: “Music and Text in Elisabeth Lutyens’s Wittgenstein Motet.” Canadian University Music Review 20, no. 1 (1999): 71–100.

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Summary: “I know from experience that sanity … lies in applying the conscious mind objectively and allowing the ‘unconscious’ – ‘inspiration’, ‘soul’, ‘spirit’ … to look, as an adult, after itself.” This remark, made early in her career by the British composer Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-83), is echoed in her insistence throughout her life that art was “a precision instrument.” Nowhere in the corpus of Lutyens’s work is this philosophy more apparent than in her twelve-tone Motet, op. 27 (1953), based on the Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1921), the landmark treatise by the Austrian-born English philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). One intriguing aspect of this beautifully constructed work is the relationship between its text and musical structure, and it is on this relationship that the main, analytical body of this paper will focus. But first, given Lutyens’s relative obscurity in North America, some biographical context is in order.