Society for Music Research
This summer, theorist Anna Rose Nelson was awarded a one-month stipend from the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland to conduct research pertaining to her dissertation on miniature forms in modernist compositions. While she was there, she spent the bulk of her time carefully analyzing the sketch material available for Brian Ferneyhough's Sonatas for String Quartet (1967), which was conceived in five large movements but exists in published form as 24 short "fragments." Thanks to help from Dr. Simon Obert, she was also lucky enough to study sketches for Anton Webern's Sechs Bagatellen (1911/1913) and a small book the composer kept with a record of the items in his library, complete with two preserved four-leaf clovers!
