In this player’s analysis of Five Scenes from the Snow Country by Hans Werner Henze, we would like to focus on the understandability of the analysis we propose, rather than to be excessively complete in the theoretical aspect of the analysis and its theoretical framework. We feel that this analytic result doesn’t really facilitate the performer with a better performance and understanding of the actual composition, but complexifies the understanding of the score even further. We feel that this approach adds a threshold instead of removing one. Therefore, this player’s analysis is based on a more intuitive musician’s approach, rather than a musicologist’s approach to analyzing serial composed music.
The very complete analysis by Yiu-Kwong Chung (1), Hans Werner Henze’s “Five Scenes from the Snow Country” , serving as Chung’s doctoral thesis for the City University of New York in 1991 provides an extremely complete analysis based on Set Theory and its analysis methods. This thesis served as a starting point for this player’s analysis, but we wanted to deviate from the extremely theoretical approach handled by Chung. Our goal is to add a more intuitive player’s analysis that points out how these five small pieces for marimba were conceived and how their complex musical language can be understood in a relatively easier way. Nevertheless, it is strongly recommended to study Chung's thesis (2) when practicing the work, and to use this website as an addendum to his work.
After a long talk about analysis methods with Jean-Luc Fafchamps, composer and professor analysis at Conservatoire Royal de Mons, we decided to approach the five pieces written by Henze in the same way he did for the analysis of Berio’s Sequenza, published in Les XIV Sequenzes de Luciano Berio (3). As we see in the analysis of Chung, the music seems to be composed in a dodecaphonic way, hence the Set Theory analysis applied by Chung. However, we believe that Henze composes in a fully chromatic way, in which he uses all twelve tones in order to organize and shape the tonal material. Henze doesn’t apply however the dodecaphonic or serial principles to all parameters of the musical text. We rather see a pitch-organization in which Henze chooses for a certain number of pitches coming out of the fully chromatic scale. In this way he creates a kind of ‘note reservoirs’, centers of tonal activity that focus on a selection of the fully chromatic scale, for a shorter or longer period in every piece. Henze keeps however the fully chromatic scale as the note reservoir for each movement of the piece in its totality.
The original score contained some errata as found by Chung, and some have been corrected in the revised edition. Nevertheless, his thesis contains also some suggestions related to his analysis. The table below lists the corrections suggested by Chung, and indicates whether or not they are corrected in the revised versions. When performing the work, compare your edition with his proposals.
The following suggestions are made based on Chung's analysis and have been discussed by him in personal conversation with the composer.