Mixture Strategies: An Analytical Framework for Musical Hybridity

Abstract

This article presents a framework to approach musical hybridity, which is understood generally as any combination of musical identities. The framework focuses on the concepts of mixture strategies—perceptible processes of interaction and manipulation of styles, genres, and other identity markers. Mixture strategies are recurrent treatments of disparate musical identities in hybrid music, and not only do they define what the materials are, they more fully explore how these entities are put together. There are four distinct mixture strategies—clash, coexistence, distortion, and trajectory—and each have peculiar characteristics and significations contingent on their use structurally and contextually. 

In the article I define and exemplify each of the four mixture strategies in composers from, or related to, the post-1960s polystylistic concert music such as Alfred Schnittke, George Rochberg, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Peter Maxwell Davies. In these works, hybridity itself is foregrounded, and articulates the musical discourse as much, and oftentimes more so, than other musical parameters. Thus, this repertory proves helpful to demonstrate a general framework that can, and should, be applicable to other hybrid repertories. As I discuss the mixture strategies, I will debate the potential interpretive tropes for each. Then, I apply these ideas in interpreting the entire second movement of Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1, a work that explores all four mixture strategies. The second movement is then contextualized within the entire concerto.