The foundations of style in the early concert music of Don Banks

Abstract

In this thesis I argue that the style of Don Banks’s early concert music can be conceptualised in terms of a set of decision-making principles that guided his compositional choices, and that the forces that formed this decision-making framework are directly attributable to the influence of his three main composition teachers, Maty as Seiber, Milton Babbitt, and Luigi Dallapiccola— influences that can be traced through the body of sketches and other related documents that Banks left after his death in 1980, and which are now held at the National Library of Australia. I begin by reviewing pertinent literature that relates to the concept of style in the arts, as well as to the debates concerning the applicability of sketch studies to musical analysis. In chapters 3-6 I trace the studies that Banks undertook with Seiber, Babbitt, and Dallapiccola, in order to determine the principal aesthetic and technical influences that these teachers exerted over his development as a composer. In these chapters I also study the composition of both the Duo for Violin and Cello (1951) and Psalm 70 (1953) since these works were written while Banks was a student of Seiber and Dallapiccola respectively. Then, in chapters 7-9, I continue to trace the development of his compositional style in the sketches for the Three Studies for Violoncello and Piano (1954), Pezzo Dramatico (1956), and the Sonata da Camera (1961). At certain points in between these chapters I pause to relate these analytical studies to Banks’s own technical and aesthetic views on musical composition, which he articulated in his own written documents and in his analyses and critiques of the compositions of other composers. I conclude that the specific direction in which Banks’s style developed during the 1950s was motivated by a process of reconciling the disparate and, at times, contradictory influences of his teachers, particularly of Seiber and Babbitt—a process that can be seen not in what he composed, but in how he composed his music.