Toward an Analysis of the Music of Prokofiev’s Middle Period

Prokofiev’s music is so individual that it is not uncommon for analysts to come up with new terms and concepts to describe it. Many of his devices have their origin in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practices, but he reinvents them in a personal way. This chapter focuses on four topics of particular relevance to the analysis of music from Prokofiev’s middle period: first, the integration of set-theoretic relationships in tonality and the importance of listening to harmonic function even in works that have simplistically been described as atonal; second, the question of how Prokofiev’s harmonic material begins to change throughout the 1930s in his search for “new simplicity”; third, the idea of multiple meanings in harmony and the related notions of branching paths and decisive moments; and finally, the tonal significance of chromatic displacement, a technique that proves central to at least a few works in each period of his life.