Busoni’s Architectural Structures

Abstract Chapter 2 elucidates Busoni’s evolving approach to musical structure, showing that Busoni’s early approach was organicist, while his mature approach also included the design of musical montages. Furthermore, it reveals that architectural principles provided him with ideas about how to move beyond linear formal models to achieve these new structures. In two pieces, the Piano Concerto, BV 39 (1906), and the two-piano version of the Fantasia contrappuntistica, BV 256b (1922), Busoni illustrated his conception of the structures with architectural drawings. In many instances, specific architectural styles were catalysts for his idiosyncratic formal approaches. Furthermore, the chapter reveals parallels between Busoni’s ideas and those of contemporary Jugendstil architects as well as those at the Weimar Bauhaus. For instance, it shows similarities between Oskar Schlemmer’s “ambulant architecture” in the Triadisches Ballet and Busoni’s textural layering in Arlecchino, BV 270.