Abstract
Donald Martino’s Notturno (1973) is both his most well known work and is among his most conceptually impenetrable. The composer’s publicly shared observations reveal little of the work’s deep formal and conceptual procedures by describing the work as being “about the diversity of feeling that I undergo daily when I contemplate my life at that moment before sleep.” Naturally this diversity manifests itself in a myriad of formal and conceptual ways representative of the composer’s remarkable mastery of serially derived materials. Identifying these materials on a moment to moment basis is not particularly taxing, but this betrays the underlying logic within the work. Finding a means of observing materials in their most simple incarnation is the best way to discern the musical and emotive instincts behind this work's construction.In my analysis, I limit my scope to the often overlooked second movement of this work and first outline a logical distilling of a (012367) hexachord removed from the music where only one hexachord in a single transposition is functionally possible, and then apply that thought process to specific moments in the second movement of Notturno. Likewise, with this distillation of pitch material, the detailed palindromic construction of the movement is much easier to identify. Once these elements are laid bare it is finally possible to accurately juxtapose Martino’s conceptual observations and glean some new insights into what he may have sought to express.