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The purpose of this study is to provide a detailed analysis of Vincent Persichetti's Masquerade for Band, which will include a conductor's guide focusing upon both technical and interpretive aspects, a brief biography of Vincent Persichetti, and background information pertaining to the creation of the composition. This document will provide the first significant and complete study of the composition since its creation in 1965.
Specifically, the analysis will examine the means by which Persichetti achieves motivic and harmonic unity within the Masquerade. The formal structure is considered a theme and variations, however, it is atypical in that each variation incorporates borrowed material from Perischetti's textbook Twentieth-Century Harmony. Although each of the borrowed excerpts seem drastically different from one another on the surface, Persichetti acknowledged that each shared a unifying kernel. In Twentieth-Century Harmony, he explains that unifying kernels are short musical fragments of at least two notes that can form the nucleus of a work and from which motivic ideas and harmonic structure is derived. Previously, the kernel in the Masquerade had been unidentified. However, significant evidence suggests that the kernel which provides motivic unity among the borrowed material and which informs the octatonic harmonies is the intervallic relationship of a minor third first revealed in the theme as pitch-classes E and G.