Eleven-Pitch-Class Systems in the Music of Mid- to Late-Nineteenth-Century Romantic Composers

This chapter discusses the Pyotr Il'yich Chaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, composed in 1877, the same year as Brahms's Second Symphony. It explores how Chaikovsky builds an entire sonata-form movement based solely on the tritone symmetries of the tonic system matrix, each pitch class of which is used as root of a structurally significant harmonic area. The chapter illustrates the tonic matrix as Chaikovsky uses it in the first movement of the symphony. Nineteenth-century Romantic composers seem to have had a special affinity for the minor mode, not only because it suited their emotional character, whether elegiac or demonic, but also because of the compositional problems inherent in the instability of the mode itself. Minor-mode compositions easily fluctuate between tonic minor and parallel major systems, creating unsettled eleven-pitch-class tonal fields. Of those Romantic composers who succeeded Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn was extraordinarily inventive in finding new and creative solutions to the problems posed by the minor mode.