ABSTRACT
The psychological 'push' of tritones within unstable-to-stable voice leading is an important source of energy in Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich's music. Temporal distribution plays a fundamental role in creating climactic and formal patterns, not to mention the dramaturgical arc of a work. Music, after all, is a temporal art form, and for motion, change, to take place, time has to pass. Shostakovich starts the next block of music in the initial pattern, but quickly disrupts the symmetry again: the phrase is now extended to nine bars. Here is a composer, then, who is playing with durational symmetry and asymmetry, balance and imbalance, stability and instability. Through the ages, composers have learnt to use these types of technique, and Shostakovich was no exception: his education involved the analysis of many 'masterworks' of the Classical tradition. Criticism of research into golden section in the arts, and in particular in music, is extensive and, in many cases, rightly condemnatory.
