Form, transformation and climax in Ruth Crawford Seeger's String Quartet, Mvmt. 3

Abstract

The paper reckons the progression of permuted registral states in Ruth Crawford Seeger's String Quartet as a walk through a Cayley graph of the symmetric group, S4. The graph privileges the 2-cycles that exchange adjacent voices in the four-voice quartet texture, imposing a metric upon the group elements that allows one to distinguish permutations that are contextually close or 'smooth' from those are distant or 'agitated.' © 2009 Springer-Verlag.