Dr. Elliott Maxim Antokoletz is currenty a professor in the Musicology division at the University of Texas at Austin, where his research is centered on the twentieth century. He studied violin with Dorothy Delay and Ivan Galamian at Julliard and received his PhD in musicology at City University of New York in 1975. He has taught music theory and chamber music at Queens College, and has performed in several chamber groups and larger ensembles, including the Queens College faculty string quartet and the New Repertory Ensemble of New York.
Much of Dr. Antokoletz's interest seems to focus on composers who bestride the border between extended chromatic tonality and atonality of various kinds. Bartók is the most obvious of these, but his research has extended also to Debussy, Scriabin, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and von Albrecht, and he has ventured into the post-Romantic tonality of Sibelius and the expressionist atonality of the Second Viennese School.
He is currently working on four forthcoming books: 1) George Perle: A Bio-Bibliography, 2) Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartók, 3) Stravinsky's Les Noces: Its Genesis and Structure and 4) The Music of Georg von Albrecht.
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Dr. Antokoletz is one of the leading American authorities on Bartók, and he has published two books about the composer. His first book, The Music of Béla Bartók: A Study of Tonality and Progression in Twentieth Century Music (University of California Press, 1984), was partially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Musicological Society. In this book, instead of simply diving narrowly into the music of Bartók, Antokoletz begins by setting forth the social and musical milieu from which the composer's work arose, a broad-based approach which has become a hallmark of Antokoletz's methodology whatever the subject at hand. In this instance, the prefatory thread traces the musical ideas that influenced Bartók, from folk sources through symmetrical pitch collections, the nationalist and impressionist composers (especially Scriabin, Debussy and Kodály), and the late-Romantic chromatic harmony of primarily German composers. He also briefly discusses the free atonality and serial constructions of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern (a subject which he will discuss in much more detail later in his career).
Following hard upon the publication of this book came a much more specialized volume, Béla Bartók: A Guide to Research (Garland, 1988). This book is an invaluable resource for any subject involving Bartók (I have used it myself on occasion). It is simply a research guide and bibliography designed to help researchers find sources. The source listings are extensive, and a second edition, published in 1997, is even larger. Many items found in this bibliography are unavailable in English, and some are even unavailable on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
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Probably the most widely known publication by Dr. Antokoletz is his Twentieth-Century Music (Prentice-Hall, 1992), a survey textbook for classes in the music of the twentieth century. It draws together some of the disparate threads in his research endeavours, and adds still more. This book is divided into halves, the first covering music until the 1940s, the second covering music from then on. Meant for graduate study, it describes the most important music of the century from a heavily analytical tack (which is probably why I like this book so much). Unsurprisingly, this book devotes an entire chapter to Bartók, and another to Stravinsky's neo-Classical period. There is also a chapter dedicated to twelve-tone tonality (using George Perle as a model), one of my own special interests, both musicologically and compositionally. I am under the impression that a second volume is forthcoming or in the planning stages, which will include a great deal of information which publishers forced Dr. Antokoletz to leave out in the interest of space. I haven't heard any news about this in a while, so I do not know the exact status of the follow-up text.
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Dr. Antokoletz also serves as co-editor of Bartók Perspectives (Oxford, 2000) and of the International Journal of Musicology, both of which contain his scholarly work, as well. In the early 1990s, the IJM ran a series of four articles discussing the musical language of Georg von Albrecht (the other co-editor of the IJM is Michael von Albrecht, the composer's son). These four articles, "Modal and Structural Variation in the Piano Works of Georg von Albrecht" (1992), "Musical Integration and Poetic Correspondence in Two Twelve-Tone Songs by Georg von Albrecht, on Poems by Georg von der Vring" (1993), "Hybrid Modes and Interval Sets as Formal Determinants in Piano Sonatas of Albrecht, Scriabin, and Prokofiev" (1994) and "From Russian Folk Music to Serialism in Violin Works of Georg von Albrecht" (1996), focus on the convergence of traditional and folk music models (such as pentatonicism and the so-called "overtone scale") with the more abstract techniques of serialism and pitch-class set constructions. These analyses are highly detailed, and contribute a great deal to the understanding of this undeservedly obscure composer. Presumably, these articles and the research, analyses and exegeses behind them will form the nucleus of the forthcoming book on Albrecht mentioned above.
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Dr. Antokoletz has also contributed several articles to the 2002 edition of the New Grove Dictionary, and he also has pieces published in scholarly anthologies. An article on Sibelius' Fourth Symphony appears in Sibelius Studies (Cambridge, 2001), a volume in the large and well-established "... Studies" series published by the Cambridge University Press. This article is a greatly expanded version of the discussion of Sibelius found in Twentieth-Century Music. Again touching on the theme of composers who work at the confluence of tonality and atonality, this article delves into the musical functionality of Sibelius' Fourth Symphony (1911), written around the time the composer began to experiment with more non-traditional musical elements such as the whole-tone, octatonic and modal pitch collections. Each movement is given in a rough formal sketch, followed by a detailed analysis of that movement.
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Throughout his career, Dr. Antokoletz's main contribution to the field of musicology has been his relentless analytical mind. His ability to ferret out abstract symmetrical and serial structures and long-distance musical connections has granted a deep understanding of the musical details of the music of the twentieth century that we would probably not otherwise have.