ABSTRACT
In 1951, Talma heard Irving Fine’s serial, albeit tonally centered, String Quartet. Already a friend and admirer of Fine and his work, she found beauty in the quartet that she had not found in other serial works. “[Fine’s music] made, for me, musical sense which straight serial writing did not, or rather twelve-tone writing [which I found to be] very mechanical,” she wrote.1 Although she had been working with limited pitch sets as motifs and as limiting factors in her earlier works, Talma established this date as the beginning of her “second period.” However, as my analysis of works prior to this point illustrate, her adoption of serial approaches at this time is really simply an enlargement of techniques she had already been working with and was steadily expanding.
