Violin Concerto No. 1 in E, Op. 11

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This concerto was composed in 1981. Structurally, it is modelled on the Berg concerto: two pairs of movements, each pair linked by a cadenza. The fabric of the music is based upon an experiment in (non-twelve-tone) serialism. There are four motives, one each of three, four, five, and six notes, and the music is constructed entirely from them, under the familiar serial operations of retrograde, inversion, and retrograde-inversion. The motives are chosen (again, somewhat as Berg might have done) so that diatonic implications can be either emphasized or avoided. (Schoenberg's comments upon Berg's use of techniques of this kind are passive-aggressive and misplaced, even by Schoenberg's usual rhetorical standards.)