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What is serialism? Defended by enthusiastic champions and decried by horrified detractors, serialism was central to twen
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The Cambridge Companion to Serialism
What is serialism? Defended by enthusiastic champions and decried by horrified detractors, serialism was central to twentieth-century art music but riven, too, by inherent contradictions. The term can be a synonym for dodecaphony, Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘method of composing with twelve tones which are related only to one another’. It can be more expansive, describing ways of composing systematically with parameters beyond pitch – duration, dynamic, and more – and can even stand as a sort of antonym to dodecaphony: ‘Schoenberg Is Dead’, as Pierre Boulez once insisted. Stretched to its limits, it can describe approaches where sound can be divided into discrete parameters and later recombined to generate the new, the unexpected, beginning to blur into a further antonym, post-serialism. This Companion introduces and embraces serialism in all its dimensions and contradictions, from Schoenberg and Stravinsky to Stockhausen and Babbitt, and explores its variants and legacies in Europe, the Americas, and Asia.
martin iddon is Professor of Music and Aesthetics at the University of Leeds. He is a composer and musicologist, the author and editor of multiple volumes devoted to post-war music, including New Music at Darmstadt, John Cage and David Tudor, John Cage and Peter Yates, and, with Philip Thomas, John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra.
Cambridge Companions to Music Topics The Cambridge Companion to Ballet Edited by Marion Kant The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music Edited by Allan Moore The Cambridge Companion to Caribbean Music Edited by Nanette De Jong The Cambridge Companion to Choral Music Edited by André de Quadros The Cambridge Companion to the Concerto Edited by Simon P. Keefe The Cambridge Companion to Conducting Edited by José Antonio Bowen The Cambridge Companion to the Drum Kit Edited by Matt Brennan, Joseph Michael Pignato and Daniel Akira Stadnicki The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera Edited by Anthony R. DelDonna and Pierpaolo Polzonetti The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music Edited by Nick Collins and Julio D’Escriván The Cambridge Companion to the ‘Eroica’ Symphony Edited by Nancy November The Cambridge Companion to Film Music Edited by Mervyn Cooke and Fiona Ford The Cambridge Companion to French Music Edited by Simon Trezise The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera Edited by David Charlton The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop Edited by Justin A. Williams The Cambridge Companion to Jazz Edited by Mervyn Cooke and David Horn The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Music Edited by Joshua S. Walden The Cambridge Companion to K-Pop Edited by Suk-Young Kim The Cambridge Companion to Krautrock Edited by Uwe Schütte The Cambridge Companion to the Lied Edited by James Parsons
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music Edited by Mark Everist The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism Edited by Benedict Taylor The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture Edited by Nicholas Cook, Monique Ingalls and David Trippett The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, third edition Edited by William Everett and Paul Laird The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies Edited by Nicholas Till The Cambridge Companion to Operetta Edited by Anastasia Belina and Derek B. Scott The Cambridge Companion to the Orchestra Edited by Colin Lawson The Cambridge Companion to Percussion Edited by Russell Hartenberger The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock Edited by Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music Edited by Eric Clarke, Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink The Cambridge Companion to Rhythm Edited by Russell Hartenberger and Ryan McClelland The Cambridge Companion to Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’ Edited by Marjorie W. Hirsch and Lisa Feurzeig The Cambridge Companion to Serialism Edited by Martin Iddon The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera Edited by Jacqueline Waeber The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter Edited by Katherine Williams and Justin A. Williams The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet Edited by Robin Stowell The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera Edited by Mervyn Cooke The Cambridge Companion to Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen Edited by Mark Berry and Nicholas Vazsonyi The Cambridge Companion to Women in Music since 1900 Edited by Laura Hamer
Composers The Cambridge Companion to Bach Edited by John Butt The Cambridge Companion to Bartók Edited by Amanda Bayley The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles Edited by Kenneth Womack
The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven Edited by Glenn Stanley The Cambridge Companion to Berg Edited by Anthony Pople The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz Edited by Peter Bloom The Cambridge Companion to Brahms Edited by Michael Musgrave The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten Edited by Mervyn Cooke The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner Edited by John Williamson The Cambridge Companion to John Cage Edited by David Nicholls The Cambridge Companion to Chopin Edited by Jim Samson The Cambridge Companion to Debussy Edited by Simon Trezise The Cambridge Companion to Elgar Edited by Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington Edited by Edward Green The Cambridge Companion to Gershwin Edited by Anna Celenza The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan Edited by David Eden and Meinhard Saremba The Cambridge Companion to Handel Edited by Donald Burrows The Cambridge Companion to Haydn Edited by Caryl Clark The Cambridge Companion to Liszt Edited by Kenneth Hamilton The Cambridge Companion to Mahler Edited by Jeremy Barham The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn Edited by Peter Mercer-Taylor The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi Edited by John Whenham and Richard Wistreich The Cambridge Companion to Mozart Edited by Simon P. Keefe The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt Edited by Andrew Shenton The Cambridge Companion to Ravel Edited by Deborah Mawer The Cambridge Companion to the Rolling Stones Edited by Victor Coelho and John Covach
The Cambridge Companion to Rossini Edited by Emanuele Senici The Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg Edited by Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner The Cambridge Companion to Schubert Edited by Christopher Gibbs The Cambridge Companion to Schumann Edited by Beate Perrey The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich Edited by Pauline Fairclough and David Fanning The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius Edited by Daniel M. Grimley The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss Edited by Charles Youmans The Cambridge Companion to Michael Tippett Edited by Kenneth Gloag and Nicholas Jones The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams Edited by Alain Frogley and Aiden J. Thomson The Cambridge Companion to Verdi Edited by Scott L. Balthazar
Instruments The Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments Edited by Trevor Herbert and John Wallace The Cambridge Companion to the Cello Edited by Robin Stowell The Cambridge Companion to the Clarinet Edited by Colin Lawson The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar Edited by Victor Coelho The Cambridge Companion to the Harpsichord Edited by Mark Kroll The Cambridge Companion to the Organ Edited by Nicholas Thistlethwaite and Geoffrey Webber The Cambridge Companion to the Piano Edited by David Rowland The Cambridge Companion to the Recorder Edited by John Mansfield Thomson The Cambridge Companion to the Saxophone Edited by Richard Ingham The Cambridge Companion to Singing Edited by John Potter The Cambridge Companion to the Violin Edited by Robin Stowell
The Cambridge Companion to Serialism Edited by
martin iddon University of Leeds
Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314 321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05 06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108492522 DOI: 10.1017/9781108592116 © Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Iddon, Martin, 1975 editor. Title: The Cambridge companion to serialism / edited by Martin Iddon. Description: [1.] | New York : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Series: Cambridge companions to music | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022033172 (print) | LCCN 2022033173 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108492522 (hardback) | ISBN 9781108592116 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Music 20th century History and criticism. | Serialism (Music) Classification: LCC ML197 .C36 2023 (print) | LCC ML197 (ebook) | DDC 780.9/04 dc23/eng/20220715 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033172 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033173 ISBN 978 1 108 49252 2 Hardback ISBN 978 1 108 71686 4 Paperback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
The Cambridge Companion to Serialism
What is serialism? Defended by enthusiastic champions and decried by horrified detractors, serialism was central to twentieth-century art music but riven, too, by inherent contradictions. The term can be a synonym for dodecaphony, Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘method of composing with twelve tones which are related only to one another’. It can be more expansive, describing ways of composing systematically with parameters beyond pitch – duration, dynamic, and more – and can even stand as a sort of antonym to dodecaphony: ‘Schoenberg Is Dead’, as Pierre Boulez once insisted. Stretched to its limits, it can describe approaches where sound can be divided into discrete parameters and later recombined to generate the new, the unexpected, beginning to blur into a further antonym, post-serialism. This Companion introduces and embraces serialism in all its dimensions and contradictions, from Schoenberg and Stravinsky to Stockhausen and Babbitt, and explores its variants and legacies in Europe, the Americas, and Asia.
martin iddon is Professor of Music and Aesthetics at the University of Leeds. He is a composer and musicologist, the author and editor of multiple volumes devoted to post-war music, including New Music at Darmstadt, John Cage and David Tudor, John Cage and Peter Yates, and, with Philip Thomas, John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra.
Cambridge Companions to Music Topics The Cambridge Companion to Ballet Edited by Marion Kant The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music Edited by Allan Moore The Cambridge Companion to Caribbean Music Edited by Nanette De Jong The Cambridge Companion to Choral Music Edited by André de Quadros The Cambridge Companion to the Concerto Edited by Simon P. Keefe The Cambridge Companion to Conducting Edited by José Antonio Bowen The Cambridge Companion to the Drum Kit Edited by Matt Brennan, Joseph Michael Pignato and Daniel Akira Stadnicki The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera Edited by Anthony R. DelDonna and Pierpaolo Polzonetti The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music Edited by Nick Collins and Julio D’Escriván The Cambridge Companion to the ‘Eroica’ Symphony Edited by Nancy November The Cambridge Companion to Film Music Edited by Mervyn Cooke and Fiona Ford The Cambridge Companion to French Music Edited by Simon Trezise The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera Edited by David Charlton The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop Edited by Justin A. Williams The Cambridge Companion to Jazz Edited by Mervyn Cooke and David Horn The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Music Edited by Joshua S. Walden The Cambridge Companion to K-Pop Edited by Suk-Young Kim The Cambridge Companion to Krautrock Edited by Uwe Schütte The Cambridge Companion to the Lied Edited by James Parsons
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music Edited by Mark Everist The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism Edited by Benedict Taylor The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture Edited by Nicholas Cook, Monique Ingalls and David Trippett The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, third edition Edited by William Everett and Paul Laird The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies Edited by Nicholas Till The Cambridge Companion to Operetta Edited by Anastasia Belina and Derek B. Scott The Cambridge Companion to the Orchestra Edited by Colin Lawson The Cambridge Companion to Percussion Edited by Russell Hartenberger The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock Edited by Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music Edited by Eric Clarke, Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink The Cambridge Companion to Rhythm Edited by Russell Hartenberger and Ryan McClelland The Cambridge Companion to Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’ Edited by Marjorie W. Hirsch and Lisa Feurzeig The Cambridge Companion to Serialism Edited by Martin Iddon The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera Edited by Jacqueline Waeber The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter Edited by Katherine Williams and Justin A. Williams The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet Edited by Robin Stowell The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera Edited by Mervyn Cooke The Cambridge Companion to Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen Edited by Mark Berry and Nicholas Vazsonyi The Cambridge Companion to Women in Music since 1900 Edited by Laura Hamer
Composers The Cambridge Companion to Bach Edited by John Butt The Cambridge Companion to Bartók Edited by Amanda Bayley The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles Edited by Kenneth Womack
The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven Edited by Glenn Stanley The Cambridge Companion to Berg Edited by Anthony Pople The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz Edited by Peter Bloom The Cambridge Companion to Brahms Edited by Michael Musgrave The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten Edited by Mervyn Cooke The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner Edited by John Williamson The Cambridge Companion to John Cage Edited by David Nicholls The Cambridge Companion to Chopin Edited by Jim Samson The Cambridge Companion to Debussy Edited by Simon Trezise The Cambridge Companion to Elgar Edited by Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington Edited by Edward Green The Cambridge Companion to Gershwin Edited by Anna Celenza The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan Edited by David Eden and Meinhard Saremba The Cambridge Companion to Handel Edited by Donald Burrows The Cambridge Companion to Haydn Edited by Caryl Clark The Cambridge Companion to Liszt Edited by Kenneth Hamilton The Cambridge Companion to Mahler Edited by Jeremy Barham The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn Edited by Peter Mercer-Taylor The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi Edited by John Whenham and Richard Wistreich The Cambridge Companion to Mozart Edited by Simon P. Keefe The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt Edited by Andrew Shenton The Cambridge Companion to Ravel Edited by Deborah Mawer The Cambridge Companion to the Rolling Stones Edited by Victor Coelho and John Covach
The Cambridge Companion to Rossini Edited by Emanuele Senici The Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg Edited by Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner The Cambridge Companion to Schubert Edited by Christopher Gibbs The Cambridge Companion to Schumann Edited by Beate Perrey The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich Edited by Pauline Fairclough and David Fanning The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius Edited by Daniel M. Grimley The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss Edited by Charles Youmans The Cambridge Companion to Michael Tippett Edited by Kenneth Gloag and Nicholas Jones The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams Edited by Alain Frogley and Aiden J. Thomson The Cambridge Companion to Verdi Edited by Scott L. Balthazar
Instruments The Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments Edited by Trevor Herbert and John Wallace The Cambridge Companion to the Cello Edited by Robin Stowell The Cambridge Companion to the Clarinet Edited by Colin Lawson The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar Edited by Victor Coelho The Cambridge Companion to the Harpsichord Edited by Mark Kroll The Cambridge Companion to the Organ Edited by Nicholas Thistlethwaite and Geoffrey Webber The Cambridge Companion to the Piano Edited by David Rowland The Cambridge Companion to the Recorder Edited by John Mansfield Thomson The Cambridge Companion to the Saxophone Edited by Richard Ingham The Cambridge Companion to Singing Edited by John Potter The Cambridge Companion to the Violin Edited by Robin Stowell
The Cambridge Companion to Serialism Edited by
martin iddon University of Leeds
Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314 321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05 06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108492522 DOI: 10.1017/9781108592116 © Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Iddon, Martin, 1975 editor. Title: The Cambridge companion to serialism / edited by Martin Iddon. Description: [1.] | New York : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Series: Cambridge companions to music | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022033172 (print) | LCCN 2022033173 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108492522 (hardback) | ISBN 9781108592116 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Music 20th century History and criticism. | Serialism (Music) Classification: LCC ML197 .C36 2023 (print) | LCC ML197 (ebook) | DDC 780.9/04 dc23/eng/20220715 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033172 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033173 ISBN 978 1 108 49252 2 Hardback ISBN 978 1 108 71686 4 Paperback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
The Cambridge Companion to Serialism
What is serialism? Defended by enthusiastic champions and decried by horrified detractors, serialism was central to twentieth-century art music but riven, too, by inherent contradictions. The term can be a synonym for dodecaphony, Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘method of composing with twelve tones which are related only to one another’. It can be more expansive, describing ways of composing systematically with parameters beyond pitch – duration, dynamic, and more – and can even stand as a sort of antonym to dodecaphony: ‘Schoenberg Is Dead’, as Pierre Boulez once insisted. Stretched to its limits, it can describe approaches where sound can be divided into discrete parameters and later recombined to generate the new, the unexpected, beginning to blur into a further antonym, post-serialism. This Companion introduces and embraces serialism in all its dimensions and contradictions, from Schoenberg and Stravinsky to Stockhausen and Babbitt, and explores its variants and legacies in Europe, the Americas, and Asia.
martin iddon is Professor of Music and Aesthetics at the University of Leeds. He is a composer and musicologist, the author and editor of multiple volumes devoted to post-war music, including New Music at Darmstadt, John Cage and David Tudor, John Cage and Peter Yates, and, with Philip Thomas, John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra.
Cambridge Companions to Music Topics The Cambridge Companion to Ballet Edited by Marion Kant The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music Edited by Allan Moore The Cambridge Companion to Caribbean Music Edited by Nanette De Jong The Cambridge Companion to Choral Music Edited by André de Quadros The Cambridge Companion to the Concerto Edited by Simon P. Keefe The Cambridge Companion to Conducting Edited by José Antonio Bowen The Cambridge Companion to the Drum Kit Edited by Matt Brennan, Joseph Michael Pignato and Daniel Akira Stadnicki The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera Edited by Anthony R. DelDonna and Pierpaolo Polzonetti The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music Edited by Nick Collins and Julio D’Escriván The Cambridge Companion to the ‘Eroica’ Symphony Edited by Nancy November The Cambridge Companion to Film Music Edited by Mervyn Cooke and Fiona Ford The Cambridge Companion to French Music Edited by Simon Trezise The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera Edited by David Charlton The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop Edited by Justin A. Williams The Cambridge Companion to Jazz Edited by Mervyn Cooke and David Horn The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Music Edited by Joshua S. Walden The Cambridge Companion to K-Pop Edited by Suk-Young Kim The Cambridge Companion to Krautrock Edited by Uwe Schütte The Cambridge Companion to the Lied Edited by James Parsons
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music Edited by Mark Everist The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism Edited by Benedict Taylor The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture Edited by Nicholas Cook, Monique Ingalls and David Trippett The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, third edition Edited by William Everett and Paul Laird The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies Edited by Nicholas Till The Cambridge Companion to Operetta Edited by Anastasia Belina and Derek B. Scott The Cambridge Companion to the Orchestra Edited by Colin Lawson The Cambridge Companion to Percussion Edited by Russell Hartenberger The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock Edited by Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music Edited by Eric Clarke, Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink The Cambridge Companion to Rhythm Edited by Russell Hartenberger and Ryan McClelland The Cambridge Companion to Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’ Edited by Marjorie W. Hirsch and Lisa Feurzeig The Cambridge Companion to Serialism Edited by Martin Iddon The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera Edited by Jacqueline Waeber The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter Edited by Katherine Williams and Justin A. Williams The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet Edited by Robin Stowell The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera Edited by Mervyn Cooke The Cambridge Companion to Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen Edited by Mark Berry and Nicholas Vazsonyi The Cambridge Companion to Women in Music since 1900 Edited by Laura Hamer
Composers The Cambridge Companion to Bach Edited by John Butt The Cambridge Companion to Bartók Edited by Amanda Bayley The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles Edited by Kenneth Womack
The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven Edited by Glenn Stanley The Cambridge Companion to Berg Edited by Anthony Pople The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz Edited by Peter Bloom The Cambridge Companion to Brahms Edited by Michael Musgrave The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten Edited by Mervyn Cooke The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner Edited by John Williamson The Cambridge Companion to John Cage Edited by David Nicholls The Cambridge Companion to Chopin Edited by Jim Samson The Cambridge Companion to Debussy Edited by Simon Trezise The Cambridge Companion to Elgar Edited by Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington Edited by Edward Green The Cambridge Companion to Gershwin Edited by Anna Celenza The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan Edited by David Eden and Meinhard Saremba The Cambridge Companion to Handel Edited by Donald Burrows The Cambridge Companion to Haydn Edited by Caryl Clark The Cambridge Companion to Liszt Edited by Kenneth Hamilton The Cambridge Companion to Mahler Edited by Jeremy Barham The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn Edited by Peter Mercer-Taylor The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi Edited by John Whenham and Richard Wistreich The Cambridge Companion to Mozart Edited by Simon P. Keefe The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt Edited by Andrew Shenton The Cambridge Companion to Ravel Edited by Deborah Mawer The Cambridge Companion to the Rolling Stones Edited by Victor Coelho and John Covach
The Cambridge Companion to Rossini Edited by Emanuele Senici The Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg Edited by Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner The Cambridge Companion to Schubert Edited by Christopher Gibbs The Cambridge Companion to Schumann Edited by Beate Perrey The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich Edited by Pauline Fairclough and David Fanning The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius Edited by Daniel M. Grimley The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss Edited by Charles Youmans The Cambridge Companion to Michael Tippett Edited by Kenneth Gloag and Nicholas Jones The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams Edited by Alain Frogley and Aiden J. Thomson The Cambridge Companion to Verdi Edited by Scott L. Balthazar
Instruments The Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments Edited by Trevor Herbert and John Wallace The Cambridge Companion to the Cello Edited by Robin Stowell The Cambridge Companion to the Clarinet Edited by Colin Lawson The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar Edited by Victor Coelho The Cambridge Companion to the Harpsichord Edited by Mark Kroll The Cambridge Companion to the Organ Edited by Nicholas Thistlethwaite and Geoffrey Webber The Cambridge Companion to the Piano Edited by David Rowland The Cambridge Companion to the Recorder Edited by John Mansfield Thomson The Cambridge Companion to the Saxophone Edited by Richard Ingham The Cambridge Companion to Singing Edited by John Potter The Cambridge Companion to the Violin Edited by Robin Stowell
The Cambridge Companion to Serialism Edited by
martin iddon University of Leeds
Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314 321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05 06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108492522 DOI: 10.1017/9781108592116 © Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Iddon, Martin, 1975 editor. Title: The Cambridge companion to serialism / edited by Martin Iddon. Description: [1.] | New York : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Series: Cambridge companions to music | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022033172 (print) | LCCN 2022033173 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108492522 (hardback) | ISBN 9781108592116 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Music 20th century History and criticism. | Serialism (Music) Classification: LCC ML197 .C36 2023 (print) | LCC ML197 (ebook) | DDC 780.9/04 dc23/eng/20220715 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033172 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033173 ISBN 978 1 108 49252 2 Hardback ISBN 978 1 108 71686 4 Paperback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
The Cambridge Companion to Serialism
What is serialism? Defended by enthusiastic champions and decried by horrified detractors, serialism was central to twentieth-century art music but riven, too, by inherent contradictions. The term can be a synonym for dodecaphony, Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘method of composing with twelve tones which are related only to one another’. It can be more expansive, describing ways of composing systematically with parameters beyond pitch – duration, dynamic, and more – and can even stand as a sort of antonym to dodecaphony: ‘Schoenberg Is Dead’, as Pierre Boulez once insisted. Stretched to its limits, it can describe approaches where sound can be divided into discrete parameters and later recombined to generate the new, the unexpected, beginning to blur into a further antonym, post-serialism. This Companion introduces and embraces serialism in all its dimensions and contradictions, from Schoenberg and Stravinsky to Stockhausen and Babbitt, and explores its variants and legacies in Europe, the Americas, and Asia.
martin iddon is Professor of Music and Aesthetics at the University of Leeds. He is a composer and musicologist, the author and editor of multiple volumes devoted to post-war music, including New Music at Darmstadt, John Cage and David Tudor, John Cage and Peter Yates, and, with Philip Thomas, John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra.
Cambridge Companions to Music Topics The Cambridge Companion to Ballet Edited by Marion Kant The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music Edited by Allan Moore The Cambridge Companion to Caribbean Music Edited by Nanette De Jong The Cambridge Companion to Choral Music Edited by André de Quadros The Cambridge Companion to the Concerto Edited by Simon P. Keefe The Cambridge Companion to Conducting Edited by José Antonio Bowen The Cambridge Companion to the Drum Kit Edited by Matt Brennan, Joseph Michael Pignato and Daniel Akira Stadnicki The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera Edited by Anthony R. DelDonna and Pierpaolo Polzonetti The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music Edited by Nick Collins and Julio D’Escriván The Cambridge Companion to the ‘Eroica’ Symphony Edited by Nancy November The Cambridge Companion to Film Music Edited by Mervyn Cooke and Fiona Ford The Cambridge Companion to French Music Edited by Simon Trezise The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera Edited by David Charlton The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop Edited by Justin A. Williams The Cambridge Companion to Jazz Edited by Mervyn Cooke and David Horn The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Music Edited by Joshua S. Walden The Cambridge Companion to K-Pop Edited by Suk-Young Kim The Cambridge Companion to Krautrock Edited by Uwe Schütte The Cambridge Companion to the Lied Edited by James Parsons
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music Edited by Mark Everist The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism Edited by Benedict Taylor The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture Edited by Nicholas Cook, Monique Ingalls and David Trippett The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, third edition Edited by William Everett and Paul Laird The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies Edited by Nicholas Till The Cambridge Companion to Operetta Edited by Anastasia Belina and Derek B. Scott The Cambridge Companion to the Orchestra Edited by Colin Lawson The Cambridge Companion to Percussion Edited by Russell Hartenberger The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock Edited by Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music Edited by Eric Clarke, Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink The Cambridge Companion to Rhythm Edited by Russell Hartenberger and Ryan McClelland The Cambridge Companion to Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’ Edited by Marjorie W. Hirsch and Lisa Feurzeig The Cambridge Companion to Serialism Edited by Martin Iddon The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera Edited by Jacqueline Waeber The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter Edited by Katherine Williams and Justin A. Williams The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet Edited by Robin Stowell The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera Edited by Mervyn Cooke The Cambridge Companion to Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen Edited by Mark Berry and Nicholas Vazsonyi The Cambridge Companion to Women in Music since 1900 Edited by Laura Hamer
Composers The Cambridge Companion to Bach Edited by John Butt The Cambridge Companion to Bartók Edited by Amanda Bayley The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles Edited by Kenneth Womack
The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven Edited by Glenn Stanley The Cambridge Companion to Berg Edited by Anthony Pople The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz Edited by Peter Bloom The Cambridge Companion to Brahms Edited by Michael Musgrave The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten Edited by Mervyn Cooke The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner Edited by John Williamson The Cambridge Companion to John Cage Edited by David Nicholls The Cambridge Companion to Chopin Edited by Jim Samson The Cambridge Companion to Debussy Edited by Simon Trezise The Cambridge Companion to Elgar Edited by Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington Edited by Edward Green The Cambridge Companion to Gershwin Edited by Anna Celenza The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan Edited by David Eden and Meinhard Saremba The Cambridge Companion to Handel Edited by Donald Burrows The Cambridge Companion to Haydn Edited by Caryl Clark The Cambridge Companion to Liszt Edited by Kenneth Hamilton The Cambridge Companion to Mahler Edited by Jeremy Barham The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn Edited by Peter Mercer-Taylor The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi Edited by John Whenham and Richard Wistreich The Cambridge Companion to Mozart Edited by Simon P. Keefe The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt Edited by Andrew Shenton The Cambridge Companion to Ravel Edited by Deborah Mawer The Cambridge Companion to the Rolling Stones Edited by Victor Coelho and John Covach
The Cambridge Companion to Rossini Edited by Emanuele Senici The Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg Edited by Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner The Cambridge Companion to Schubert Edited by Christopher Gibbs The Cambridge Companion to Schumann Edited by Beate Perrey The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich Edited by Pauline Fairclough and David Fanning The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius Edited by Daniel M. Grimley The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss Edited by Charles Youmans The Cambridge Companion to Michael Tippett Edited by Kenneth Gloag and Nicholas Jones The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams Edited by Alain Frogley and Aiden J. Thomson The Cambridge Companion to Verdi Edited by Scott L. Balthazar
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The Cambridge Companion to Serialism Edited by
martin iddon University of Leeds
Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314 321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05 06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108492522 DOI: 10.1017/9781108592116 © Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Iddon, Martin, 1975 editor. Title: The Cambridge companion to serialism / edited by Martin Iddon. Description: [1.] | New York : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Series: Cambridge companions to music | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022033172 (print) | LCCN 2022033173 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108492522 (hardback) | ISBN 9781108592116 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Music 20th century History and criticism. | Serialism (Music) Classification: LCC ML197 .C36 2023 (print) | LCC ML197 (ebook) | DDC 780.9/04 dc23/eng/20220715 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033172 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033173 ISBN 978 1 108 49252 2 Hardback ISBN 978 1 108 71686 4 Paperback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of Figures [page xi] List of Tables [xv] List of Contributors [xvi] Preface [xix]
part i contexts i
[1]
1 Theorising Serialism catherine nolan
[3]
2 The Aesthetics of Serialism m a r c u s z a g o r sk i [20] 3 Serialism in History and Criticism a r n o l d w h i t t a l l [37] part ii composers
[55]
4 Arnold Schoenberg and the ‘Musical Idea’ ja c k b os s [57] 5 Alban Berg’s Eclectic Serialism s i l vi o d o s s a n t o s [73] 6 Rethinking Late Webern s e b a s t i a n w ed l e r [87] 7 Milton Babbitt and ‘Total’ Serialism a n d r e w m e a d [108] 8 Pierre Boulez and the Redefinition of Serialism c a t h e r i n e lo s a d a [125] 9 The Serial Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen im ke mi sch [140] 10 Luigi Nono and the Development of Serial Technique a n g e l a i d a d e be n e d i c t i s a n d v e n i e r o r iz za r d i [154]
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Contents
11 Stravinsky’s Path to Serialism m a u r e e n c a r r [183] part iii geographies
[203]
12 Serialism in Western Europe m a r k d e l a e r e [205] 13 Serialism in Canada and the United States e m i l y ab r a m s a n s a r i [225] 14 Serialism in Central and Eastern Europe i w o n a l in d s t e d t [241] 15 Serialism in the USSR p e te r j . s c hm e l z [253] 16 Serialism in Latin America bj ör n he i le [266] 17 Serialism in East Asia nancy yunhwa rao
[278]
part iv contexts ii
[301]
18 Towards an Authentic Interpretation of Serial Music p e te r o ’h a g a n [303] 19 Metamorphoses of the Serial (and the ‘Post-Serial’ Question) c ha r l es w i l s o n [317] 20 Technologies and the Serial Attitude j e n n i f e r i v e r s o n [340] References [365] Index [405]
Figures
1.1 Schoenberg’s row tables for the Suite op. 25 [page 5] 4.1 Part of Schoenberg’s set tables for the Suite op. 25, with a pitch-class map [60] 4.2 Schoenberg, Prelude op. 25, bb. 1–3 [61] 4.3 Schoenberg, Prelude op. 25, b. 13 [62] 4.4a and b Schoenberg, Prelude op. 25, bb. 17b–21 [64] 4.5a and b Schoenberg, Piano Piece op. 33a, bb. 1–9 [66] 4.6a and b Schoenberg, Piano Piece op. 33a, bb. 14–22 [69] 4.7 Schoenberg, Piano Piece op. 33a, bb. 32b–34 [71] 5.1 Berg’s illustration of the row set in the Lyric Suite, borrowed from F. H. Klein (Berg 2014: 203) [77] 5.2 Berg’s illustration of the all-notes and all-intervals chord [78] 5.3 Berg’s illustration of axis of rotation generating the C major and G♭ chords and scales [78] 5.4 Pitch reduction of Berg’s Violin Concerto, Part ii, bb. 125– 37; after Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Musiksammlung F21 Berg 27, fols. 20 v–21 r [84] 6.1 Webern, string trio fragment, M. 273, bb. 1–5 and 2{a}, accompanied by some analytical annotations, based on a transcription of the manuscripts and sketches as provided in Wörner (2003: 75 and 88); the sources are archived at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel [94] 6.2a, b, and c Klumpenhouwer network interpretation of Webern’s string trio fragment M. 273, bb. 1–2 and 2{a}, as defined by Lewin (1990) and Klumpenhouwer (1991) [95] 6.3a, b, c, and d Webern, ‘Dein Leib geht jetzt der Erde zu’, M. 276: transcription of the sketch of the first melodic idea and twelve-tone row, ‘Sketchbook i’, p. 11, archived at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, accompanied by some annotations highlighting the constitution of the interval vector space as illustrated in Table 6.1 [97] xi
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List of Figures
6.4 Reconstruction (modified transcription) of Webern’s fragment ‘Dein Leib geht jetzt der Erde zu’, M. 276, ‘Sketchbook i’, p. 11, archived at The Morgan Library & Museum, New York [98] 6.5 a and b Webern, Symphony, op. 21/ii, final variation (reduction), accompanied by some analytical annotations [101] 6.6 Webern, Cantata No. 1, op. 29/iii, bb. 34–43 (reduction) [106] 7.1 Trichordal array composed into fifteen subsets of four elements [112] 7.2 Trichordal disposition in the last section of Composition for Four Instruments [114] 7.3 The opening block of a four-part all-partition array [117] 7.4 Duration patterns in Composition for Four Instruments [120] 7.5 Time-point rows and an aggregate realisation [121] 8.1 Pitch-class multiplication as described by Boulez. e*c (ec) results from realising each one of the ordered pitch-class intervals that occur above the bass in e (the multiplicand) over each pitch-class of c (the multiplier) [126] 8.2 Annotated reproduction of pre-compositional table for ‘Séquence’, from Third Piano Sonata. Paul Sacher Foundation, Pierre Boulez Collection (Mappe H, Dossier 2 f,1) [127] 8.3a and b Transformation graph modelling the partitioned row and other levels of structure in ‘Séquence’, from Third Piano Sonata; partitioned row for ‘Séquence’ [129] 8.4 Summary of serial developmental techniques [131] 8.5 The consequence of transposing a chord by the retrograde of embedded pitch intervals (in registral space) is a common tone in pitch space [132] 10.1a and b Composizione per orchestra [No. 1] (1951). Sketch of the precompositional material for bb. 17–25, Archivio Luigi Nono (facsimile) [159] 10.2a and b Polifonica–Monodia–Ritmica (1951). Generation of ‘degrading’ intervallic material of the opening four-part canon of Polifonica (bb. 1–40) [162] 10.3 Polifonica–Monodia–Ritmica (1951). Four-part canon (bb. 1–40) built by reading each of the four derivations right to left, bottom up, beginning with sparse sounds and gradually filling the space (score, Ars Viva, excerpts: bb. 1–28) [165]
List of Figures
10.4 Polifonica–Monodia–Ritmica (1951). Serial permutations of the Afro-Brazilian rhythm (‘Jemanjá’) employed in the movement Polifonica (sketch, Archivio Luigi Nono; facsimile) [166] 10.5 Typescript of Luigi Nono with text selection and sketches for Cori di Didone (Archivio Luigi Nono) [170] 10.6 Il canto sospeso, no. 2: schematic rendering of the first three rotations of the parametric series [175] 10.7 Il canto sospeso, no. 2: the final outcome of Nono’s compositional device as represented in the score (Ars Viva AV 50) [176] 10.8 Multi-parametric module prepared for Sarà dolce tacere (used in the second section, bb. 26–67) [179] 10.9 Representation of the various group types obtained from the transformation of an original group [182] 11.1 Cantata, ‘Ricercar II’, overlapping sets [184] 11.2 Cantata, sketch page showing serial variants [185] 11.3 In memoriam Dylan Thomas, diplomatic transcription of sketch page [187] 11.4 Vlad’s chart of various forms of Threni row [191] 11.5 Threni condensed orchestral score, bb. 5–18. © 1958 by Boosey & Co. Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission. [192] 11.6 Movements, original (prime) row, split into hexachords α and β [195] 11.7 Movements, diplomatic transcription of sketch page, annotated with rotation of hexachord 6–7 [196] 11.8 Elegy for J.F.K., diplomatic transcription of sketch page [200] 12.1a and b O. Messiaen, ‘Île de feu 2’ (scale subjected to permutation) and ‘Île de feu 2’, bb. 8–27. © Durand S.A. [208] 12.2 Michel Fano, Étude for 15 instruments, bb. 1–10 (sounds as written) [213] 12.3 Bo Nilsson, Zwanzig Gruppen, excerpt from the piccolo part [222] 17.1a and b Luo Zhongrong’s tone row and Picking Lotus Flowers, bb. 1–8 [284] 17.2a, b, and c Gagaku melody, tone row, and Yoristsune Matsudaira, ‘Variations’, bb. 1–3 [292]
xiii
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List of Figures 18.1 Anton Webern, draft of first variation, third movement of Piano Variations op. 27, bb. 12–23 [307] 18.2 Anton Webern, draft of fourth variation, third movement of Piano Variations op. 27, bb. 56–66 [307] 20.1 Milton Babbitt sketch, perhaps for Composition for Synthesizer (1961) or Ensembles for Synthesizer (1964), showing how music notation was translated into the fivechannel parameters of the RCA Mark II. ColumbiaPrinceton Electronic Music Center Records, 1958–2014. Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries. Temporary inventory box CPEMC-00264 [351] 20.2 Yellow Magic Orchestra, ‘Technopolis’, sectional formal plan. Dotted line marks temporal halfway point. X = groove, A = Japanese melody, B = flute melody, C = trumpet canon [355] 20.3 Programming the MC-8 using numeric translations of pitch and duration at specific timepoints (for example, measures and beats or ‘steps’). Owner’s manual, p. 24 [357]
Tables
1.1 6.1 7.1 7.2
Row forms from Schoenberg’s Suite op. 25 [page 5] Interval vectors of the 4–7 tetrachord family, based on Forte (1973) [95] Instrumental disposition in Composition for Four Instruments [114] The seventy-seven possible ways of partitioning twelve parts into lyne segments of various lengths [116] 10.1 Il canto sospeso, no. 2: table coordinating the all-interval series with the duration Fibonacci series (I–XV: bb. 108–42; XVI–XIX (proportional canon): bb. 142–57) [174] 10.2 Il canto sospeso, no. 2: table coordinating the dynamics series with the all-interval series [174] 15.1 Music in Rudolf Lück (ed.), Neue Sowjetische Klaviermusik. Cologne: Gerig, 1968 [257]
xv
Contributors
emily abrams ansari is Associate Professor of Music at Western University. angela ida de benedictis is Scientific and Research Manager at the Paul Sacher Foundation. jack boss is Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the University of Oregon. maureen carr is Distinguished Professor of Music at Pennsylvania State University. mark delaere is Professor of Music at the University of Leuven. silvio dos santos is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Florida. björn heile is Professor of Music (Post-1900) at the University of Glasgow. martin iddon is Professor of Music and Aesthetics at the University of Leeds. jennifer iverson is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Chicago. iwona lindstedt is Professor of Music at the University of Warsaw. catherine losada is Professor of Music Theory at the University of Cincinnati. andrew mead is Professor of Music Theory at Indiana University. imke misch is Director of Research at TU Braunschweig. catherine nolan is Professor of Music at Western University. peter o’hagan is a pianist and writer specialising in contemporary music. nancy yunhwa rao is Professor of Music Theory at Rutgers University. xvi
List of Contributors
veniero rizzardi is Professor of Music at the State Conservatory of Padua. peter j. schmelz is Professor of Music at Arizona State University. sebastian wedler is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Utrecht University. arnold whittall is Professor Emeritus of Music at King’s College London. charles wilson is Lecturer in Music at Cardiff University. marcus zagorski is Assistant Professor of Music at Comenius University.
xvii
Preface
In the year I was an MPhil composition student, there were two of us working with Robin Holloway: me and another young British composer, Benjamin Harris. Ben wrote elegant, beautifully crafted music, in which he worked hard – and always successfully – to fuse a strict usage of the twelvetone method with the sonic language of an essential English tradition, epitomised by his namesake, Britten. Thinking of myself, at the time, as a loyal, orthodox student of the post-minimal composer, Steve Martland – with whom I had been studying privately since the beginning of my undergraduate studies – I regularly pestered Ben to justify the necessity, or value, of the strict approach he took to dodecaphony. At the same time, in my own music, I was making use of rhythmic devices I had borrowed (if also misunderstood) from Brian Ferneyhough, introduced to me by Fabrice Fitch, himself a Ferneyhough student. These involved the systematic use of number series to create both metrical structures and the rhythmic frames which filled them. Pitch was determined, and later added, by a separate process, which involved rotations – if memory serves – of Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition. On one occasion, I outlined these systems and devices to Ben as a way, I imagined, of showing precisely why I thought his reliance on a Schoenbergian method unnecessary. Ben’s response to my parametric approach to material was inevitable: ‘Why!’ he exclaimed, ‘You’re more of a serialist than I am!’ If, as Sebastian Wedler says in his contribution to this volume, the image of Webern which emerges in the reception history seems like the hydra, serialism writ large feels chimerical. Defining it involves fusing together elements which could not – indeed cannot – co-exist (and nonetheless do). But, more, it sometimes seems to take on the quality of myth: no shortage of composers figured their practices in opposition to the ‘strictness’ of a serial method, yet pinning down more than a handful of pieces which pursue such dogmatic adherence to serial ‘rules’ is a challenge. If anything, what emerges here is surely the individual quality (and qualities) of the approaches taken with respect to a centre which could never have been expected to hold, not least because it is not, and perhaps never was, a single thing.
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Preface
As Catherine Nolan and Marcus Zagorski note in the first two chapters in the present volume – on a theme which runs throughout the text in many different configurations – serialism has been taken to be a synonym for dodecaphony, of the twelve-tone method, where the twelve-tone row is figured as a series; it has been taken to indicate an extension of dodecaphony, such that twelve-element series of musical parameters other than pitch are treated in analogous ways, alongside pitch; it has been taken to define a ‘multiple’ serialism, wherein independent musical parameters are treated systematically in some way before their (re)combination, even where none of those parameters are divided up into groups of twelve; it has been taken to indicate a sort of general mode of thought which might proceed from and encompass all of the above, but also modes of composing which, though interested in the separability and independence of parameter, are less concerned – if concerned at all – with the necessity for systematic or rigorous treatment of those parameters. In this last case, such definitions begin to bleed into what Adorno described as musique informelle or post-serialism, categories themselves less neatly dissociable from serialism than the privative ‘post-’ of the latter category might suggest, as Charles Wilson argues. Indeed, as Jennifer Iverson proposes, this sort of more expansive terrain might afford productive readings of musics which exhibit apparently serial characteristics even if in much less familiar territory – in sampling, in EDM, in hip hop – in ways which surely reveal the instability at the heart of any singular, totalising attempt to pin serialism down. In similar vein, though the text contains detailed examinations of the composers surely most readily recognised as having been the past century’s leading composers of serial music – Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, and Igor Stravinsky – as well as its familiar geographical heartlands of Western Europe and North America, it seeks to press beyond this, insisting on serialism as a performed music and showing the vibrancy of approaches to serialism in Eastern Europe, Russia, Latin America, and East Asia. This, too, figures the ways in which serialism ceased to be the property of a small coterie of expert composers, notwithstanding the brilliance of their respective contributions, and became part of a much more diverse musical conversation, in terms of activity, geography, ethnicity, and gender alike. With this more expansive, increasingly global view, it becomes clear that for every occasion serialism has been decried as a sort of restrictive artistic straitjacket, there is another where it has acted as a totemic expression of
Preface
apparently unlimited artistic freedom. Although on one, ultimately globally northern, view serialism seems like a historical trend – so bound up with the needs and compulsions of the twentieth century that it can be, at best, a potent mirror for the contemporary world – this broader one suggests that there may, yet, be new statements to be made with and through it. The preparation of this volume took place, in large part, against the backdrop of the pandemic, and its development was, perhaps unsurprisingly, significantly slower than it might otherwise have been as a result. I owe an enormous debt of thanks to all of the contributors for their good humour and mutual understanding of the various challenges faced by us as a body of scholars during this period. Sam Ridout’s help in ensuring editorial consistency across the text was immeasurably valuable. I am grateful, too, to Kate Brett and her team at Cambridge University Press for their support and faith in the project from start to finish. In mind of the brief anecdote above, which I have had often in my mind in working on the contributions to this volume, I would like to dedicate it to three formative figures: to the memory of Steve Martland, because I think it would have made him laugh to figure in any guise in a volume dedicated to serialism; to Robin Holloway, in gratitude for challenging, inspiring conversations about Lulu and why it sounds the way it does; and to Fabrice Fitch, who thought I might have some promise, probably before anyone else did, and was kind enough to tell me so.
xxi
part i
Contexts i
1
Theorising Serialism catherine nolan
Serialism is a virtually ubiquitous phenomenon in studies of twentiethcentury music. Readers and writers alike will almost certainly understand the context in which the term is used in individual instances, but those contexts differ widely. The linguistic contrast between the nouns ‘series’ and ‘serialism’ may partially account for the vast array of contexts in which serialism is used: ‘series’ refers concretely to a succession of objects in a fixed order, while the suffix ‘-ism’ in ‘serialism’ refers more abstractly to a belief in a particular practice, system, or philosophy. Within its various contexts, three broad understandings of serialism can be discerned, distinctions which, too, exhibit significant linguistic contrasts. First, serialism may refer to ordered successions of objects, including twelve-tone rows, in which case the context may be described as twelve-tone serialism or, sometimes, simply dodecaphony. Second, serialism may refer to the expansion and diversity of compositional approaches and aesthetics based on a series, which may or may not contain twelve elements. On occasion, this version of serialism might be viewed not as a continuation of twelve-tone serialism, but as a sort of opposition to dodecaphony. Third, serialism may refer to a way of thinking, ‘state of mind’ (Dallapiccola, quoted in Alegant 2010: 9), philosophy, or even ideology that reveres rigour, order, and unity as compositional principles while disconnecting them from musical style or method. Such wide-ranging, verging on contradictory, understandings of serialism shape this exploration of theorising serialism, incorporating the notion of a row or series and fixed ordering of elements, expansion of musical parameters for fixed ordering, and the extension of the serial concept into the realm of sound generation and timbre. In my view, the absence of a singular definition should be regarded positively, adding nuance to any theorisation of serialism.
3
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catherine nolan
Part I: Before 1945 The Serial Concept The serial concept in musical composition originated as an organisational framework based on the principle of fixed ordering of elements. Arnold Schoenberg articulated a ‘method for composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another’ in a 1941 lecture given at the University of California at Los Angeles (Schoenberg 1975a), which in turn was based on notes prepared in 1934 for a lecture at Princeton University known as the ‘Vortrag über Komposition mit 12 Tönen’. The published essay came to be regarded as the definitive authorial statement on Schoenberg’s twelvetone technique, but as noted by Claudio Spies and others, the 1934 version of the material is more theoretically focused and precise, addressing compositional technique directly and dispensing with spiritual and other extramusical elements included in the 1941 version (Spies 1974; cf. Covach 2017; Hyde 1982). Fixed ordering of pitch classes acquired a privileged position in Schoenberg’s compositional practice beginning in 1921. David Lewin described Schoenberg’s twelve-tone practice as integrating the serial concept with permutations of the aggregate (Lewin 1968: 1), which is to say, related ways of ordering a particular twelve-tone series (its prime form), stereotypically by inverting the pitch relationships (inversion), or reversing their order (retrograde), or both (retrograde inversion), and by beginning any such permutation on a different opening pitch class. Uncoupling the serial concept from permutations of the aggregate is pivotal to any understanding of the concept itself. Schoenberg described the Suite for Piano op. 25 (composed between 1921 and 1923) as his first composition to adopt serial ordering of the twelve pitch classes, but he employed serial pitch-class ordering prior to op. 25 using series of different lengths in the Five Pieces for Piano op. 23 and in the Serenade op. 24. Fixed ordering of elements in Schoenberg’s early serial practice reflected compositional choices about the identity, number, and realisation of elements within an underlying theoretical framework. The series forms that appear in Schoenberg’s Suite op. 25 are shown in Table 1.1, with each form analogous to its manifestation in Schoenberg’s row tables from 1921, in which the row forms are displayed rather differently (Figure 1.1). Note in Table 1.1 that the inverted form begins a tritone from the first pitch class of the prime form. The four basic transformations are followed by their tritone transpositions, completing the eight row forms
Theorising Serialism Table 1.1 Row forms from Schoenberg’s Suite op. 25 Prime E♮ F♮ G♮ D♭ G♭ E♭ A♭ D♮ B♮ C♮ A♮ B♭
Retrograde B♭ A♮ C♮ B♮ D♮ A♭ E♭ G♭ D♭ G♮ F♮ E♮
Inversion B♭ A♮ G♮ D♭ A♭ B♮ G♭ C♮ E♭ D♮ F♮ E♮
Retrograde Inversion E♮ F♮ D♮ E♭ C♮ G♭ B♮ A♭ D♭ G♮ A♮ B♭
T6: Prime B♭ B♮ D♭ G♮ C♮ A♮ D♮ A♭ F♮ G♭ E♭ E♮
T6: Retrograde E♮ E♭ G♭ F♮ A♭ D♮ A♮ C♮ G♮ D♭ B♮ B♭
T6: Inversion E♮ E♭ D♭ G♮ D♮ F♮ C♮ G♭ A♮ A♭ B♮ B♭
T6: Retrograde Inversion B♭ B♮ A♭ A♮ G♭ C♮ F♮ D♮ G♮ D♭ E♭ E♮
Figure 1.1 Schoenberg’s row tables for the Suite, op. 25
that appear throughout the Suite, with the result that all eight forms begin and end on pitch classes E♮ and B♭. The eight row forms shown in Table 1.1 belong to a complex of relations within what were to become known as the classical serial transformations, which are shown idiosyncratically in Schoenberg’s row
5
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catherine nolan
tables in Figure 1.1, completed in 1921. The layout and labelling of the row tables in Figure 1.1 will appear unconventional a century after their creation in light of more familiar representations of dodecaphonic series and matrices in the scholarly literature, but they are of great value in revealing enduring aspects of Schoenberg’s serial thinking. In addition to the row forms that appear in the Suite, the sketch also includes four brief compositional drafts, explicitly blending theoretical and practical concerns within the single sketch. Figure 1.1 consists of four quadrants. The upper left quadrant shows the prime (or basic) form and its retrograde, each partitioned into its discrete tetrachords over three staves with a brief compositional draft based on the prime form inserted between the prime and retrograde forms. The prime form is labelled T for Tonika, and the retrograde is labelled TK, where K refers to Krebs. Note that the three tetrachords of T appear, in order, in the top, middle, and bottom staves, while the three tetrachords of TK appear, in order, in the bottom, middle, and top staves. While the division of the complete twelve-element series into its discrete tetrachords on separate staves serves to display simultaneously the whole and significant parts, this arrangement conceals the linear retrograde relations. Such a multidimensional understanding of serialism from the outset became a critical component of Schoenberg’s serial thought. The tetrachordal partitioning also explicitly reveals the homage to Bach, and by extension the genre of the Baroque dance suite, with the BACH motive that appears in its original form in the first tetrachord of the retrograde (TK) form (seen in the bottom staff, upper left quadrant in Figure 1.1). The other three quadrants are organised in the same fashion. The upper right quadrant shows the inversion of the row (beginning a tritone from the starting pitch of the prime form), labelled TU, where U refers to Umkehrung. The retrograde of the inversion, that is, the retrograde inversion, appears to the right of the inversion, and is labelled TUK. The bottom left and bottom right quadrants in Figure 1.1 show the prime, retrograde, inversion, and retrograde inversion forms all transposed by six semitones, with D for Dominante replacing T in the labels. The characterisation of the prime form as Tonika preserves the familiar principle of a central, referential entity to which others are related, while Schoenberg’s identification of the tritone transposition as Dominante divulges his understanding of the interval of the tritone as a type of equivalency with the most essential tonal relationship, the dominant, perhaps a strategy for mediating the radical nature of the new compositional approach with an explicit appeal to familiar, traditional relationships (cf. Phipps 1986). In addition to the
Theorising Serialism
fundamental role of the tritone in the complex of row forms, the interval of the tritone as the boundary interval between the first and last pitch classes of the row (E♮ and B♭) ensures that each row form begins and ends on these pitch classes. The striking brief compositional drafts that are interspersed between the prime and retrograde forms and between the inversion and retrograde inversion forms in the row tables (and their tritone transpositions) are noteworthy for their treatment of the discrete tetrachords. Within each compositional draft, the discrete tetrachords are set as a three-note sonority followed by a single pitch in beamed sixteenth notes. The setting of the first tetrachord of the prime form, consisting of the sonority E♮-D♭-F♮ followed by the single pitch G♮, appears to be a draft of the music that occurs in the opening bar of the Intermezzo. The settings of the second and third tetrachords from T in the draft replicate the same rhythmic and textural patterns, as do the settings in the remaining three compositional drafts. The three-note sonorities obfuscate the linear order within each tetrachord; they do not systematically set the first three elements, and the single note following the three-note sonority is never the fourth element. They are consistent in articulating the tetrachordal contents, but inconsistent in articulating their internal distribution. The conspicuous treatment of the row tetrachords – in the tables and in the composition – has led to some debate about whether the Suite should be understood as a hybrid work in which some movements are based on arrangements of tetrachords comparable to the row tables (the Prelude, Gavotte, Musette, Intermezzo, and Menuett), while other movements reflect the linear, fixed twelve-tone ordering (the Trio for the Menuett and the Gigue) (Haimo 1990: 84–5; Hyde 1983: 470–9; Boss 2014: 38; Whittall 2008: 32–5). I would argue that the tetrachordal partitions in the row tables, being derived from a preexisting construct, support Schoenberg’s early and full understanding of the series as a multidimensional entity. Jack Boss describes Schoenberg’s flexible approach to serial ordering in the Suite and later works as ‘a spectrum of ways of presenting the row that ranged from an unordered aggregate on one end of the spectrum to complete, perfect ordering on the other end’ (Boss 2014: 37). By separating compositional practice from abstract, conceptual speculation, this spectrum of possibilities succinctly epitomises the theorisation of the serial principle and foreshadows the greater expansion of the serial concept to come. The principle of serial ordering of pitch classes represented a radical approach to the treatment of musical materials and a venture into the avantgarde, notwithstanding Schoenberg’s efforts to retain important connections
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with his musical heritage. The enrichment of the serial concept in the decades following its inception continued to be characterised by radical departure from compositional norms. Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Piano op. 23 and the Serenade op. 24 are commonly regarded as precursors to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method because they employ series of fewer than twelve elements in the first four movements of op. 23 (Hyde 1985) and greater than twelve elements in the variations movement of op. 24 (Lester 1968). Recalling the linguistic shifts and nuances of ‘serialism’, these works are sometimes described as ‘serial’ so as to reserve the descriptor ‘twelvetone’ specifically for the consistent serial ordering of the twelve pitch classes and the classical permutations of the aggregate (prime, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion). Given the pervasive impact of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, this is understandable, but for the purposes of this chapter, the twelve-tone method is regarded as a particular, and particularly significant, manifestation of the serial concept. The serial concept expressed itself in the expansion of Schoenberg’s treatment of pitch classes into serial treatment of other musical parameters by fixed ordinal schemes and later into more complex, derived, logical processes, reflecting new ways of thinking about musical materials. The radical nature of Schoenberg’s 1921 discovery is inseparable from its iconic position in the history of musical modernism (cf. Moore 1995: 77–8), and similarly, the radical quality of later manifestations of the serial concept is inseparable from the cultural context in which they appeared. Theorising serialism must take cultural, historical, and aesthetic considerations into account.
Messiaen Like Schoenberg, Olivier Messiaen is strongly identified with musical modernism in the first half of the twentieth century, and, though from a different aesthetic tradition, his teachings and compositions also inspired the development of the serial concept, independent of the permutation of aggregates. Messiaen is known for his idiosyncratic treatment of rhythm, characterised by eschewal of traditional metric and tonal patterns. His interest in non-Western rhythmic patterns (such as the deçi-tâlas collected in the thirteenth century by Śārn˙gadeva), including non-retrogradable rhythms, as musical objects and his creation of independent series of pitches and durations unfolding simultaneously further underscore the multidimensional nature of the serial concept. The first movement of the Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1941), ‘Liturgie du crystal’, scored for piano, cello, clarinet, and violin, offers a clear example
Theorising Serialism
of Messiaen’s early serial conception. The cello and piano parts unfold two simultaneous series in each instrument. The cello part, entirely in harmonics, superimposes a repeating short five-element series of pitches (not pitch classes) with a repeating fifteen-element series of durations. Similarly, the piano part superimposes a repeating twenty-nine-element series of chords with a repeating seventeen-element series of durations (cf. Taruskin 2005a: 237–8). The two series in the cello part come into synchronisation after every three statements of the pitch series, since five is a divisor of fifteen, while the two series in the piano part never come into synchronisation during the movement. Vincent Benitez, in discussing Messiaen’s preoccupation throughout his career with time and eternity, observes the composer’s division of musical time through discrete segments treated in a cyclical manner as a central interest in his serial thought (Benitez 2009). The recurring synchronised closures of the pitch and duration series in the cello part contrast with the complete absence of closure in the piano part, which would seem to go on forever or at least well beyond the span of the movement, expressing the sense of temporal spatialisation and eternity. Similarly conceived pitch and rhythmic series recur in the remaining movements of the Quatuor, reflecting the composer’s ‘spatial understanding of musical time through its quantification’ (Benitez 2009: 294). Messiaen’s treatise, Technique de mon langage musical (1944), detaches general compositional parameters – rhythm, melody, harmony – from one another, a separation which will come to be central to later ideas of what the serial might be, while adding idiosyncratic features of the composer’s own compositional practice, including bird song and his modes of limited transposition (Messiaen 1994). Beyond the technical, the organisation and tone of this unique text anticipate some of the foundational principles of post-1945 serialism. For instance, temporality is prioritised in the Technique by its position as the first parameter to be considered (following a brief single-page chapter on the interrelations of the three parameters). The treatise and the rational processes for treatment of pitch and rhythm in the Quatuor show that Messiaen’s predisposition towards serial thinking was already established prior to the end of the Second World War. His creative autonomy, aesthetic independence from tradition, and objective attention to rhythm, equal to the attention given to pitch, isolate these primary musical parameters for individual treatment. Messiaen’s novel conceptions of pitch, rhythm, and form became pivotal for younger composers of new music and earned for him a leadership position in what would come to seem a serial movement (Whittall 2007: 234). Yet through the later twentieth century, Messiaen
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pursued his distinctive individual compositional concerns about continuity independent of the composers he had so deeply influenced in the postwar years. As Arnold Whittall explains, ‘the remarkable heterogeneity of later twentieth-century developments indicate that avant-garde convictions evolved and persisted even as more “classical” concerns with continuity re-emerged alongside them’ (Whittall 2007: 251).
Part II: After 1945 The Serial Movement It is inviting, or even seductive, to reflect on the post-1945 period as a new beginning or Stunde Null (Zero Hour) in musical composition because of the impact of the enormous social and political upheaval at the end of the Second World War in Europe. A young generation of composers from different European countries, who had been deprived of the opportunity to hear and study new music during the years of political repression and war, aspired to build an utterly new and radical approach to composition that repudiated their European musical heritage in favour of isolating individual elements of parameters of compositional materials (pitch, duration, dynamics, articulation, timbre). This allowed for a focus on individual sounds as discrete objects, and the novel attitude to composition, harnessed in unique ways by individual composers, became known as serialism, implying an affiliation with Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method introduced about a quarter of a century earlier. Yet, at the same time, the most vocal of the young serialist composers rejected the classical techniques of Schoenberg’s method; their fascination lay, in many cases, with Messiaen, then later with Anton Webern, in whose music they discovered great abstraction, purity, and examples of proportional and permutational treatment of musical elements. Nevertheless, one of those younger composers, Bruno Maderna, would later underscore continuity over rupture in post-1945 musical composition, arguing that ‘there has never been any zero-year in music . . . just as there never can be any zero-year of culture’. Maderna would stress that the idea of a zero-year (or Zero Hour) was an illusion for the young that assisted them in ‘re-ordering [their] ideas before going forward’ (Maderna, quoted in Fearn 1990: 316). Maderna’s serial practice itself was ‘as deeply rooted in the contrapuntal tradition of the past, as it was committed to the exploration of new ideas in musical expression’
Theorising Serialism
(Neidhöfer 2007: 1). M. J. Grant, among others, has rejected the idea of a Stunde Null because, despite the prevalent belief in the creation of a new society among the younger generation, the growing polarisation created by the Cold War among other factors resulted in something closer to cultural pluralism (Grant 2001: 17–20; cf. Beal 2000: 107–10). The infamous essay by another young composer, Pierre Boulez’s ‘Schoenberg Is Dead’ (1952), described as the ‘ultimate statement of the Stunde Null position’ by Richard Taruskin (Taruskin 2005b: 18–19), observes Schoenberg’s recent death only months after it occurred, though notably some seven years after the end of the war, but then castigates Schoenberg for taking serialism in the wrong direction by confusing series and theme, for devising a method intended for rigorous control of chromatic writing, for maintaining the outmoded texture of melody and accompaniment, and for not exploring new corresponding modes of structural organisation. The essay concludes by elevating Webern above Schoenberg for his innovations in rhythm and his avoidance of large, extended forms. Though Boulez was exposed to Webern’s music through his teacher, René Leibowitz, author of Schoenberg et son école (1947), it is perhaps worth noting that Boulez later distanced himself from Leibowitz (Boulez 1952; cf. Erwin 2020). The intricate narrative of discourse about new music in the years following the Second World War and into the early 1950s embraces the advancement of and later distancing from serialism by some of its proponents; it must balance the opposition of radical innovation, as in the Stunde Null perspective, and historical continuity, including varying stances on serial and contrapuntal practices of Schoenberg and Webern. The serial movement in Europe in the early 1950s, which was characterised by what appeared to be a core of shared compositional interests, was ultimately short-lived, as the representative composers sometimes became engaged in aesthetic disputes and pursued separate compositional trajectories (cf. Toop 2004: 453–5).
Die Reihe and Darmstadt The journal Die Reihe: Information über serielle Musik, published in German from 1955 to 1962 (followed by an English edition from 1958 to 1968), launched its run, with editors Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen, with a volume devoted to electronic music. The foreword to that first volume pronounces the journal to be a ‘mouthpiece for the younger generation’ (Grant 2001: 19) and effectively exposes the far-reaching connotations of the
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serial concept immediately upon the journal’s launch by associating it definitively with the new medium of electronic music. The essays in the first volume impart a shared vision of a radical commitment to electronic music as a fitting medium for music of the time. This shared vision and mode of discourse embody the enlargement of the serial concept to incorporate sound generation and timbre. In his essay, ‘What Is Electronic Music?’, Herbert Eimert describes the radical nature of the new medium and asserts Webern as a principal inspirational source through his visionary understanding of proportion and stylistic purity (Eimert 1958). That said, Eimert was not of the younger generation purported to be the voice of the journal; yet in opposition to the journal’s stated aims, his was the first text a reader would encounter. Thirty years younger than Eimert, Paul Gredinger, in his essay ‘Serial Technique’, explicitly portrays the new medium as an expression of serialism that features approaches to proportion and mathematical rationalisation shared with architect Le Corbusier’s methods of calculating architectural proportions (Grant 2001: 165–6). Gredinger wrote: ‘It is our task to describe a fundamental attitude; a principle that we may call the Series . . . Our aim is an art, in which proportion is everything: a Serial Art’ (Gredinger 1958: 40; translation modified, italics and capitalisation in original). The Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt acted as a locus for the study and reception of new music. Young composers from across Europe – including countries recently occupied by Germany – such as Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, Karel Goeyvaerts, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, became known as the Darmstadt School, an incongruous moniker in light of the aesthetic differences and disputes among the members, as well as its relatively brief existence. It is fitting that Darmstadt became the setting for the educational and ideological platform of the Darmstadt New Music Courses, dedicated to the study and performance of new music, as Darmstadt had been a cultural centre, including a leading centre in the Jugendstil movement earlier in the twentieth century, and underwent a dramatic rebirth after the catastrophic destruction at the end of the Second World War (Iddon 2013: 1–32). While the voices of young composers, particularly Boulez and Stockhausen, strongly articulated the central tenets of the serial attitude, they were encouraged by contemporary composers of an older generation, notably Olivier Messiaen and Herbert Eimert, whose experience, iconoclastic approaches to composition, and knowledge of repertoire offered guidance and leadership. Messiaen visited Darmstadt in 1949, and his ‘Mode de valeurs et d’intensités’, the second and most abstract movement of the Quatres
Theorising Serialism
Études de rhythme, written there, became emblematic for many of the younger composers (Iddon 2013: 31). Each of the three parts of the movement is based on permutations of thirty-six pitches (three divisions of twelve each), twenty-four durations, seven dynamic levels, and twelve modes of articulation. As M. J. Grant and others point out, the order of elements is not fixed; as a component of a mode, each pitch is assigned a corresponding duration, dynamic, and articulation value, but the order of presentation is flexible (Grant 2001: 61–2). The permutations are determined by disparate processes distinct from the aggregate permutations of twelve-tone serialism and reflect an interest in control over all aspects of sound. Whereas pitch material in twelve-tone serialism is strictly ordered and other parameters (durations, dynamics, articulation) are free, in ‘Mode de valeurs’ the reverse is true: the other parameters are fixed in relation to pitch while the order of pitches is free (Johnson 1975: 106–7). The allusion to the rigour and discipline of Schoenberg’s method in ‘Mode de valeurs’, not to mention the use of series of twelve elements, is clear, but the resulting three-part texture created by the predetermined sonic objects in each mode, characterised by varying levels of activity and absence of rests, avoids all reference to traditional textures and structural organisation; the interest in fundamental properties of sound production – attack, duration, decay, dynamics – reveals the link of the serial concept with electronic composition. As a performer, Messiaen was no doubt acutely sensitive to the sonic implementation of his music. Pianist Peter Hill describes the experience of preparing ‘Mode de valeurs’ for performance. The piece as a whole began to reveal a shape, with a sense of exposition at the opening as the ‘modes’ begin to unravel, and of a corresponding winding down at the end, where the upper stave resumes its mode in the original order. Meanwhile the interest in the central part of the piece lies in the incisive interplay between staves, especially where notes of similar dynamic come in quick succession. (Hill 2007: 89)
Hill’s account of Messiaen’s 1951 recording of the Quatres Études de rhythme, made shortly after the completion of the composition, reinforces his remarks about the challenges of creating clarity and differentiation of the elements of dynamics and articulation (Hill 2007: 89). ‘Mode de valeurs’ had a direct impact on several of the young serial composers, in some cases reinforced by Messiaen’s recording (Iddon 2013: 59–60). Three pertinent examples are Boulez’s Structure Ia, the second movement of Karel Goeyvaerts’s Sonata for Two Pianos, and Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel. A brief review of mutual precompositional
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principles underlying these three works will illustrate the serial underpinning of the Darmstadt School in the early 1950s. Boulez’s Structure Ia (1951–2) for two pianos takes the first series or division from ‘Mode de valeurs’ and assigns order positions from 1 to 12 to each pitch class, treating the series as a twelve-tone row, but avoiding the classical twelve-tone permutations. The numerical values of the order positions from Messiaen’s original series always refer to the pitches in the original series and are translated into representations of pitch classes; two 12 × 12 matrices, one derived from the original form of the series and the other derived from the inversion, display the twelve transpositions and twelve inversions of the series, respectively. The series of twelve durations in ‘Mode de valeurs’ is likewise read in the same matrices, while the predetermined link in Messiaen’s work between pitch and other parameters is abolished. The two piano parts systematically deploy forms of the series from the matrices in reciprocal fashion for the most part, with occasional spontaneous choices or liberties, and the sense of three continuous textural layers in Messiaen’s work is absent (Taruskin 2005b: 33–4). In effect, Structure Ia, though derived from procedures in ‘Mode de valeurs’, is based on very different precompositional strategies. The second movement of Karel Goeyvaerts’s Sonata for Two Pianos, presented in Darmstadt in 1951, does not make direct use of Messiaen’s pitch material from ‘Mode de valeurs’ but applies algorithmic procedures to the same parameters of pitch, durations, dynamics, and modes of articulation. Goeyvaerts’s compositional procedure involves the assignment of discrete values to the elements of each parameter as they pertain to notes or points in the score, absolutely or relative to an arbitrary reference point. Parametric values are summed and correspond, in principle, to Goeyvaerts’s mystical idea of the ‘synthetic number’ (cf. Iddon 2013: 53–7; Delaere 1996; Toop 1974: 153–4). Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel (1952, later revised), scored for oboe, bass clarinet, piano, and three percussionists and first performed at Darmstadt, was inspired in recognisable ways by Messiaen’s ‘Mode de valeurs’ and the second movement of Goeyvaerts’s Sonata for Two Pianos (Maconie 1976: 26). In Kreuzspiel, as in Messiaen’s ‘Mode de valeurs’, pitches are fused with non-pitch parameters into sonic units. In Kreuzspiel’s three main sections, the sonic units unfold continual permutations that are based on systematic registral reorderings mirrored in time over the course of the work. Serial treatment in Kreuzspiel includes dynamic repositioning of composite elements on local and
Theorising Serialism
large scales (cf. Iddon 2013: 72–5; Maconie 1976: 21–6; Toop 1974: 158–64). Herbert Eimert, already an established composer, author, and musicologist before the war, became a leading figure in the propagation of new music through his involvement in the Darmstadt New Music Courses between 1946 and 1951, his editorial position for Die Reihe, and his roles as radio broadcaster and administrator in the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk from 1945 to 1955 (Iverson 2019: 23–4). Although the Stunde Null perspective on new music in early post-war Germany is associated with youth, Eimert’s familiarity with new technology and his experience in administration and publication facilitated the dissemination of the serialist agenda. His influential Musikalisches Nachtprogramm, ‘a bimonthly broadcast aimed at educating listeners on the concepts and sounds of the “new” music that had been suppressed or unknown during the war’ (Iverson 2019: 23–4), helped to bring the experience of hearing new music to the young composers who sought to formulate their own declaration of a compositional philosophy. As co-editor of Die Reihe with Stockhausen, Eimert’s engagement in the serialist agenda was particularly visible. His leadership role at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk from its beginning in 1955 (following the separation of the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk into the Norddeutscher Rundfunk and the Westdeutscher Rundfunk) enabled him to promote music created in the major electronic music studios in Germany and beyond as music ‘that could finally take full compositional control over timbre, as well as the other compositional elements such as pitch, duration, and dynamics’ (Iverson 2019: 76). In this way, understanding electronic music as a reflection of the serialist agenda, overtly expressed in the first volume of Die Reihe, is consistent and logical. An essay by WolfEberhard von Lewinski in the fourth volume of Die Reihe devoted to young composers captures this linkage: [The most gifted of today’s composers] have found a new way that promises a solution for their conflict of conscience to compose no superfluous notes and yet not to imitate Webern. They have been urged on by the timely ‘invention’ of electronic music . . . Webern’s intentions have been regarded as completely justify ing serial modes of procedure, but now they can be revivified by applying them in a field that is new and spacious . . . the field of electronic musical material. Composition with this material, more than any other, requires very comprehensive laws. (Lewinski 1960: 3)
Just as serial precompositional schemes and structures regulated by numerical patterns or designs in acoustic serial music were sometimes overridden
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by composers’ aesthetic and poetic choices, composers of electronic music also had to make compromises for practical reasons due to technological limitations in the studio (Iverson 2014b: 345–6). Partitioning the twentieth century into pre- and post-1945 periods serves a useful purpose and marks an undeniable point of division, but, as the quotation from Maderna above (p. 10) implies, the Stunde Null perspective taken literally is oversimplistic and loses sight of strands of continuity from before 1945 that persisted, including the continued interest in and extension of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone techniques in spite of their renunciation by some of the most vocal younger composers. Luigi Nono, for example, some of whose early works were performed at Darmstadt in the early 1950s, wrote about the atomic concentration on individual properties of sound in terms of an expansion, not rejection, of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique (Nono 2018b; cf. Nono 1958). Nono’s Il canto sospeso (1955–6), a nine-movement work, exhibits serial precompositional schemes to profile individual musical parameters, including a single, all-interval twelve-tone series that governs the pitch content (Nielinger 2006). His compositional technique expresses the serialist aesthetic of rigorous permutational control over individual musical parameters but distinguishes itself with its expressive text and overt political, anti-fascist message. Similarly, Luciano Berio embraced aspects of the serialist agenda in the early 1950s, and followed practices similar to other Darmstadt composers, but did not relinquish authority to serial routines. As Christoph Neidhöfer explains, ‘[Berio] had a clear vision of, and maintained full control over, how the music would ultimately sound’ (Neidhöfer 2009: 304). The coherent and related expressions of serialism as a compositional practice and aesthetic in the early 1950s in Darmstadt were transitory, as the composers pursued their individual conceptions of musical material, organisation, and continuity. The cessation of publication of Die Reihe in 1962 perhaps similarly reflects the dearth of common ground in the conception of serialism, both as compositional technique and as a way of thinking (cf. Toop 2004: 475).
Serialism in the United States of America Of the three understandings of serialism given in the introduction to this chapter (p. 3), only the first two (serialism in terms of fixed ordering of elements and serialism in terms of expansion and diversity of compositional approaches and aesthetics) prevail in serialism in the United States, explained in part by the different dissemination of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique.
Theorising Serialism
Before the Second World War, Schoenberg’s music was not well known in the United States outside ‘ultra-modern’ composers such as Henry Cowell, but interest in his music grew dramatically after the war (Peles 1998: 500–4). The third understanding of serialism (serialism as a philosophy or ideology) did not evolve analogously in the United States, due to different attitudes towards Schoenberg, different wartime experience, different cultural and political contexts, and different views about history and historical consciousness (Peles 1998: 509). No cohesive school of thought or doctrine analogous to the Darmstadt School appeared in the United States, yet the end of the war coincided in the United States with a desire among many composers for artistic renewal. Between 1955 and 1961, composer and music theorist Milton Babbitt published three articles that set the foundation of twelve-tone theory in terms of a theoretical expansion of Schoenberg’s method (Babbitt 1955; Babbitt 1960; Babbitt 1961). Babbitt’s music is sometimes described as aggregate music because of the successions of aggregates whose interior pitch-class arrangement is directed through the organisation of arrays (Mead 1994: 13–16). Babbitt generalised Schoenberg’s techniques in mathematical terms while uncovering the potential for expansion beyond Schoenberg’s practice. Drawing on mathematical group theory, he demonstrated that combinatoriality, for example, a technique explored extensively by Schoenberg, could be generalised within the twelve-tone system to reveal compositional potential far beyond that utilised by Schoenberg. Babbitt employed mathematics in his theoretical writings and music not as a compositional device, but as a means to expose a system of seemingly endless abstract possibilities (cf. Morris 1987). Babbitt was appointed to the faculty at Princeton University in 1938, and his advanced training in mathematics, formal logic, and analytical philosophy helped to facilitate the addition of the PhD in composition to its highest degrees in music along with musicology. Indeed, the expansion of access to college education was profitable to the dissemination of serialism in American higher education, as seen in the 1956 dedication of the Schoenberg Hall as a concert space at the University of Los Angeles at California (Feisst 2011: 236). With the inclusion after the war of musical composition as a subject for advanced study in the American academy, new music began to escape much of its association with the avant-garde. Serialism acquired a more mainstream image and was characterised by a wide range of compositional applications that were influenced to varying degrees by techniques of Schoenberg. Many, though certainly not all, serial composers were affiliated within a university setting (Straus 2008: 373–7).
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The legacy of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique in the United States is reflected in the compositional practices of composers such as Roger Sessions, Aaron Copland, Elliot Carter, and Igor Stravinsky, in addition to Babbitt. Sessions, who had been Babbitt’s composition teacher, engaged in serial practices in his Solo Violin Sonata in 1953 only after recognising its potential in the music of Dallapiccola and Babbitt. With his knowledge of Schoenberg’s music, Sessions explored the capabilities for greater control over the circulation of the aggregate (Peles 1998: 508). Like Sessions, Copland too explored serial techniques, perhaps most notably in his orchestral work, Connotations (1962), synthesising with them tonal strategies and sonorities (Peles 1998: 515). Elliot Carter did not explicitly espouse serial practice, but his compositional style became significantly more rigorous following the war with the development of his signature technique of metric modulation (Taruskin 2005b: 275–6), a method for proportionally transforming one metre into another, combinatorial methods of identifying subsets of the aggregate (Link 2022: 33–9), and his exploration of all-interval series (cf. Morris and Starr 1974). These mathematically inspired techniques, undoubtedly discovered independently, reflect the composer’s new sense of purpose (Taruskin 2005b: 276– 80). Finally, Stravinsky, who emigrated to the United States in 1939, became interested in Schoenberg’s music in 1952, following Schoenberg’s death. Stravinsky’s direct engagement with Schoenberg’s techniques waned as he explored serial techniques influenced by Ernst Krenek, particularly the technique of rotational arrays (Straus 2001: 8–21). Stravinsky had read Krenek’s Studies in Counterpoint (1940) and attended a lecture by Krenek at Princeton in 1959 that was later published as ‘The Extent and Limits of Serial Techniques’ (Krenek 1960). Stravinsky became known for his application and extension of Krenek’s technique of rotational arrays, explained in detail in Krenek’s article, in his later works (Straus 2001: 141–82).
Part III: Conclusions The distinction between serialism in Europe and the United States, while expedient in a discussion of theorising serialism, becomes limited in its effectiveness, partially in consideration of technological developments after 1945, including computer and recording technologies that have impacted the composition and dissemination of new music. The serial concept has in some way or another engaged aesthetic and practical interests of composers across the Western world for the last century, regardless of nationality.
Theorising Serialism
Notwithstanding the absence of a straightforward, secure definition, serialism became a leading force in twentieth-century music in Europe and the United States. Universal principles of purity, rationalism, and objectivity and a demand for severance from the past seem to underlie the aesthetics of the serialist movement in post-war Europe, even if these principles, on close examination, were not held uncritically (Whittall 2008: 151; cf. Iverson 2019: 75). In the United States, the need for separation from the past after the war did not carry political overtones in the same way, but a wish for distance from the past in the spirit of artistic revitalisation can be recognised in the music of many composers. The desire to explore fresh, innovative means of musical organisation through varying conceptions of serialism created common ground across geographical and temporal divides. The common ground across the geographical divide of the Atlantic Ocean between conceptions of serialism in Europe and the United States, and the common ground across the temporal divide between debates surrounding Schoenberg’s method before and after the war illuminate the adoption of serialism into the realm of intellectual history (cf. Ashby 2001). As Marcus Zagorski explains, referring to serialist composers in Europe, attention to discipline and control over material was a connecting link that was reflected in individual compositional decisions and technique (Zagorski 2009). Such a broad characterisation of autonomy granted to individual material constituents in musical composition can similarly be recognised in new music by composers on the other side of the Atlantic, as Anne C. Shreffler writes: If there is a common denominator in the diverse techniques and approaches called ‘serialism’, then it is the notion of granting autonomy to the different qualities of musical material. In the absence of an a priori harmonic system, pitch and rhythm were no longer privileged as the defining features of musical content. (Shreffler 2005: 221)
Recognising this common denominator, however, plays only a part in theorising serialism. Cultural context, along with the individualistic and conflicting attitudes, circumstances, and compositional approaches among key figures involved are further vital factors. Theorising serialism recognises its transmutation, in technical, theoretical, and philosophical terms, across most of the twentieth century. Acknowledging the dynamic disposition, instability, and impermanence of serialism is essential to framing its theories.
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The Aesthetics of Serialism marcus zagorski
Any study of the aesthetics of serialism should begin with definitions of ‘aesthetics’ and ‘serialism’, for the long and complex histories of these terms have given rise to conflicting usage. This chapter begins with definitions and then analyses examples of serial aesthetics found in writings about serial music. Following this, six central themes in the aesthetics of serialism are outlined and supported with further examples from a diversity of sources. The chapter concludes with thoughts about what relevance serial aesthetics might have for the study of music and the humanities today.
Serialism As this Cambridge Companion so abundantly illustrates, serialism is not one thing. It is a variety of different practices by different people, in different locations, in different periods, and under different historical conditions. Why does this caveat matter? Because even if the same term ‘serialism’ is used, it may mean different things to different people, and that is why definitions form a necessary starting point. In the most basic sense, serial music is music that is based on a series of something. The series makes the music ‘serial’. Beyond this, however, it becomes complicated, for the question ‘a series of what?’ can be answered differently according to different understandings of the term ‘serialism’. In English and French, ‘serial music’ or musique sérielle is used broadly to refer to any music that uses the serial principle, both when the series is applied only to the organisation of pitch (as in the music of Schoenberg and his students) and when it is applied to multiple aspects of music at the same time, such as pitch, duration, loudness, and timbre (as in the music of many post-war serial composers). This post-war practice is sometimes called ‘multiple serialism’ or ‘total serialism’ in English. The English and French terms for serial music follow the original meaning of musique sérielle, which was coined by the composer and author René Leibowitz in 1947 in 20
The author is grateful for support from VEGA grant no. 1/0015/19.
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his writings about the twelve-tone method of Schoenberg and his students (Blumröder 1995). German usage differs. In German, there are two terms: Zwölftonmusik (twelve-tone music) and serielle Musik (serial music). Zwölftonmusik refers to music that uses the series only for the organisation of pitch. Serielle Musik, on the other hand, refers to what is sometimes called ‘multiple serialism’ in English, that is, to compositional techniques developed in the 1950s and 1960s that (to a greater or lesser extent) purposefully differentiated themselves from Schoenberg’s pitch-based serialism and applied the series simultaneously to other so-called parameters of music, including duration, loudness, and timbre. This chapter, like this book as a whole, understands serialism in the broadest sense and includes all meanings and practices; it encompasses music that uses a series to organise pitch only and music that uses a series to organise anything else.
Aesthetics ‘Aesthetics’ is also a term that has different traditions of usage. The philosopher Wolfgang Welsch has argued that aesthetics, as defined narrowly in philosophical encyclopaedias and by philosophers in the discipline itself, would be more accurately named ‘artistics’: it is an ‘explication of art with particular attention to beauty’. As such, it does not respect the much more general ‘science of sensuous cognition’ that was established by Alexander Baumgarten in the eighteenth century and for which he invented the name ‘aesthetics’. Aesthetics in the narrow sense – what Welsch calls ‘artistics’ – means only the philosophy of art, and Welsch notes that this meaning was introduced by Immanuel Kant, developed by G. W. F. Hegel, and is still preferred by many philosophers today (Welsch 1997). My ‘aesthetics of serialism’ understands ‘aesthetics’ in the narrower sense. This chapter is concerned with ideas about art – more specifically, ideas about serialism, as they appear in writings on music and the philosophy of music. This includes ideas about what serialism is or what it should be, ideas about why it is or why it should be, ideas about where it came from or where it is going, ideas about its value or significance, and ideas about its connection to other realms of culture, including other art forms, the sciences, and politics. These facets of the aesthetics of serialism are not separate and distinct; rather, they blend together, are subtly interconnected, and are fused with ideas about compositional technique. In fact, this is one of the most challenging
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aspects of the aesthetics of serialism: texts that are ostensibly about compositional technique often include aesthetic positions and touch upon other branches of philosophy such as ethics and metaphysics, and other realms of culture such as politics, science, and history. Two specific examples will help to illustrate this point. These examples, taken from the writings of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno and the composer György Ligeti, will introduce some, but not all, of the central themes in serial aesthetics that are outlined later in this chapter.
Example 1 Adorno In his book Philosophy of New Music, Adorno described Schoenberg’s twelvetone method as ‘truly the fate of music’: The rules are not arbitrarily conceived. They are configurations of the historical obligation in material. . . . A system of the domination of nature results in music. It corresponds to a desire present since the beginnings of the bourgeois era: to grasp and order all sound, and to reduce the magic essence of music to human logic. . . . The subject dominates music through the rational system, only to fall victim to the rational system itself. (Adorno 1975: 65 8)
Before unpacking this passage, one should note that Adorno’s study of Schoenberg in Philosophy of New Music is titled ‘Schoenberg and Progress’. Progress is perhaps the most essential idea in the aesthetics of serialism, and it lies behind many of the central themes examined later in this chapter; it was present from the inception of the technique in the 1920s and through its widespread and varied practices in the 1950s and 1960s and continues to be germane for those composers who are still today influenced by serial techniques. Adorno’s understanding of progress, however, was not the usual one. Throughout his writings, he argued that, although we have little choice but to follow the dictates of historical progress, such progress may not always result in a better world – or better music. One must therefore, he believed, constantly assert subjective individuality against the collective historical process. This dialectic is the key to understanding the passage on Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method just quoted, as well as much of Adorno’s other writing about music. But understanding the dialectic itself is not straightforward, for it brings together the philosophy of Hegel, the social theory of Max Weber, and the theory of a ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ that Adorno had developed with Max Horkheimer. The complexities of these ideas obviously deserve an explication that goes beyond the confines
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of this short chapter, but it is possible to summarise Adorno’s dialectic and then explain its import in a bit more detail. The briefest possible summary for the cognoscenti would be as follows. The history of intersubjective consciousness in Western culture (a kind of Hegelian Geist) advances according to the efforts of humans to free themselves from the forces of nature, which they accomplish through the control and mastery of nature. This process can be seen in the progressive demystification of the world (as in Weber’s idea of Entzauberung, to which I turn presently) and the increasing rationalisation of all aspects of social life. But in its drive to master nature, human subjectivity has given rise to instrumental rationality, the absolute domination of which turns against the liberated subject and becomes a new form of control over the subject. The twelve-tone method, according to Adorno, reflects this process in the very material of music. Now, that may be fine as far as summaries go, but what does it really mean? One must return to Adorno’s text as quoted and examine it line by line to better understand. The reason that Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method is said to be ‘truly the fate of music’ is the same reason that its ‘rules are not arbitrarily conceived’: Schoenberg did not so much choose to compose in this way but was thought to be required to do so. Adorno believed that serial music resulted from a historical process in which musical expression developed through the breakdown of formal conventions, increasing chromaticism, and increasing dissonance to atonality, as well as (though not mentioned in the quotation in question) through the use of the variation principle in the music of Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms. These developments were said to be consolidated in Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method and subjected to rational control. Adorno’s belief that a supposedly ‘objective’ historical process directed the course of compositional technique depends upon a philosophy of history that can and should be critiqued. In other words, the question of whether there really was an obligation for Schoenberg to compose twelvetone music, as Adorno claimed, should be asked; the alternative is that Schoenberg merely chose to compose twelve-tone music. Notably, Adorno’s historical narrative favours practices from a certain period of Austro-German music while ignoring other periods and other cultures – and ignoring, by the way, Schoenberg’s own reasons for inventing the twelve-tone method. Adorno’s philosophy of history is evident in the next sentence of the quoted passage: the rules of the twelve-tone method, he claimed, are ‘configurations of the historical obligation in material’. This ‘historical
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obligation’ can be understood as a version of Hegel’s idea of an objective Geist, or ‘spirit’, that directs world history. Adorno saw no problem in using Hegel’s idea, and he later admitted that it was a central theme in his Philosophy of New Music and even ‘taken for granted’ in his own experience of the world (Adorno 1950). But Adorno’s ‘objective spirit’ was not strictly Hegelian. It depended also on Weber’s social theory of increasing rationalisation in Western culture, and the connection to Weber helps make sense of the next part of the quotation. ‘A system of the domination of nature results in music’, the next sentence states. ‘It corresponds to a desire present since the beginnings of the bourgeois era: to grasp and order all sound, and to reduce the magic essence of music to human logic.’ These sentences read like a textbook example of Weber’s idea of Entzauberung, the literal translation of which is ‘the process of taking the magic out of something’, or ‘demystification’. Weber, a tremendously influential sociologist, wrote of the increasing rationalisation of social practices in the Western world from the period of the Renaissance onwards and described this as entailing a belief that ‘whenever one desired, one could find that there are fundamentally no mysterious, incalculable forces involved [in things], but rather, that all things – in principle – can be controlled by means of calculation. But this means: the demystification [Entzauberung] of the world’ (Weber 1995: 19). Weber argued that this tendency went hand in hand with the progressive domination of nature, and Adorno described the twelve-tone method explicitly as a system by which music dominates nature. For Adorno, the nature being dominated was both the sound material manipulated by the composer and also the expressive impulse of the composer himself – both were controlled by the rationality of the twelve-tone method, which reduced the ‘magic essence of music’ by subjecting it to the order of ‘human logic’. If at this point Adorno’s aesthetics begins to look like a critique of serialism, the final sentence in the quoted excerpt leaves no doubt: ‘the subject dominates music through the rational system, only to fall victim to the rational system itself’. In other words, the effect of Schoenberg’s twelvetone method of composition was that it enchained the composer and robbed him of his subjective freedom. But Schoenberg was not the only victim, according to Adorno. His compositional method mirrored a larger social process in which humans are robbed of their freedom and enslaved by the forces of rationalisation. This larger social theory was presented by Adorno and Horkheimer in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which they critically examined the development of Western culture up to the
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period of the Hitler regime and tried to understand ‘why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’, the ‘barbarism’ in this case referring not only to the rise of totalitarianism but also the manipulative forces of capitalism and the culture industry (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972: xi). They argued that a particular idea lies at the root of Western culture and can be ‘traced back to the first chapters of Genesis’, that is, that humans have tried to advance their own interests by means of the domination and control of nature (Jay 1996: 258). Such efforts, however, which were intended to liberate humans from the forces of nature, have developed into a new force that impedes the realisation of liberation. In other words, the use of instrumental rationality to control nature now controls the user and precludes their freedom; that is the dialectic of enlightenment. The ideas presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment were essential for the Schoenberg critique in Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music, and Philosophy of New Music was seen by Adorno as ‘definitive for everything that [he] wrote about music thereafter’ (Adorno 1977: 719). Understanding these texts will help one understand Adorno’s music aesthetics. Subsequently, as serial practices spread beyond the Schoenberg school in the 1950s and were developed by a younger generation of composers, Adorno believed his critique of prewar serialism to be even more applicable to post-war serialism. As composers applied serial ordering to not only pitch but also duration, loudness, and timbre, Adorno critiqued the further expansion of rational control and greater loss of subjective freedom. Post-war composers, on the other hand, saw their expansion of serial technique as progress, and they did not concern themselves with the dialectics or discontents of that progress.
Example 2 Ligeti One example of the narrative of progress many post-war serial composers shared can be seen in a passage from an essay by the composer György Ligeti: After Schoenberg had found a rule based method for ordering free atonality, the serial principle, which was first applied only to the dimension of pitch, strove for expansion to the totality of form. This led to the discrete quantification of all parameters, through which such music became the result of overlapping prefabri cated arrangements . . . But only shortly after durations, intensities and timbres had been serially organised, the expansion of this method sought to cover more global categories, such as relationships between [different] registers and densities, and distributions of types of movement and structure, as well as the proportioning of the entire course of form. (Ligeti 1960b: 5)
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What Ligeti described here is the post-war development of serialism in Western Europe, from a method that applied serial order only to pitch to a method that applied serial order to many other aspects of music. The reason his description is of interest is because it implies that the serial method did not result from the preferences and decisions of composers; rather, it was the result of some larger historical process. Although Ligeti did not explicitly invoke an ‘objective spirit’ as Adorno did, that spirit is at work behind the scenes. This becomes apparent in the way in which Ligeti’s writing endows technique with agency: the serial principle, he claimed, ‘strove for expansion to the totality of form’; the expansion of the method then ‘sought to cover more global categories’. In Ligeti’s telling, it was not the subjective decisions and aesthetic preferences of composers at work; rather, it was the technique, and history itself, that directed composers’ actions. Many other serial composers believed in this historical narrative and thereby ignored their own personal preferences in choosing compositional techniques. Pierre Boulez wrote in 1952 that serialism was a ‘logical consequence of history’ (Boulez 1991f: 214), and he wrote this in an essay titled ‘Schoenberg Is Dead’, apparently oblivious to the fact that Schoenberg himself, in the essay ‘Composition with Twelve Tones’, described the twelve-tone method as a necessary historical development that was dictated by the laws of nature (Schoenberg 1975a). Schoenberg, it seems, was not dead: he lived on in some of Boulez’s own ideas about music. Boulez learned the twelve-tone method from the student of Anton Webern, friend of Schoenberg, and creator of the term musique sérielle René Leibowitz, who argued in lectures and writings that serialism was a logical and necessary development resulting from the history of polyphony (Kapp 1988: 5–6). By the late 1950s and early 1960s (the time in which Ligeti’s essay appeared), a diversity of composers refused to let this myth die. Luigi Nono, for example, claimed in 1958 that an ‘absolute historical and logical continuity of development prevails between the beginnings of twelve-tone music and its current state’, and he cited as evidence the same historical stages given by Ligeti in the quotation discussed here (Nono 1958: 25). In 1964, Dieter Schnebel also cited these historical stages and then proposed additional steps to continue their further progress (Schnebel 1972). Schnebel has been seen by some as a critic of serialism, but he did, in fact, preserve the historical narrative so essential to its aesthetics. Ligeti also was seen as a critic of serialism, and the essay from which the quotation is taken was interpreted by some readers as ‘the epitome of an anti-serialist
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manifesto’ (Borio 1993: 33). But the fact that this historical narrative was maintained by these supposed critics of serialism, and remained relatively long in circulation, shows the extent to which serial aesthetics also influenced developments away from early serial composition. Similar ideas about history were shared by otherwise dissimilar composers, and these ideas bind the post-serial music of the 1960s and beyond to the aesthetics of serialism and testify to its influence. The appeals to historical necessity and progress were not only voiced explicitly, as in the statements discussed here, they also underlie most of the themes that are examined in what follows.
Themes in the Aesthetics of Serialism It is difficult to reduce serial aesthetics to essential themes – both because of the amount and diversity of writing on the topic and because these themes are not necessarily presented distinctly as such in this writing. But there are shared ideas that helped give serial music and aesthetics their features and that contributed to the prestige they once had. It should be noted that many of these ideas arose in the post-war period. This is understandable given that the technique became widespread after the Second World War, and there was a corresponding increase in writing about the topic then. The reasons why serialism became widespread are considered in an ensuing subsection on the influence of serial aesthetics (‘The Influence of Serial Aesthetics’).
History, Necessity, and Progress The excerpts from Adorno and Ligeti quoted in Examples 1 and 2 express a belief that composers are not free to choose the materials with which they work; rather, composers are said to be required to act in accordance with the demands of some higher power, and doing so contributes to historical progress. This general idea, with differing details, is frequently encountered in writings on the aesthetics of serialism. It can be seen in Schoenberg’s assertion that the twelve-tone method was dictated by the ‘laws of nature’; it is clearly a part of Adorno’s belief in an ‘objective spirit’; and it informs the understanding of history outlined by later serial and post-serial composers including Boulez, Nono, Ligeti, and Schnebel. The idea of progress is also relevant to most of the themes outlined below: it is relevant to the relation between serialism and the political realities of the post-war period,
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to the connection of serialism to science and technology, to the idea of composition as experimentation, to the serial ideals of unity and organicism, and to the new culture of listening and musical perception implicit (and sometimes explicit) in serial music. The idea of progress has, accordingly, been given pride of place in this chapter. It is an idea that depends upon the assumption that progress is desirable or, at least, necessary, and this assumption tells us much about the period in which serialism became widespread. It tells us perhaps even more about the immediately preceding period, for progress can seem desirable or necessary when the past (or present) becomes unbearable.
Politics: Anti-fascist Resistance, Anti-communist Resistance, and Freedom It is a paradox of serial aesthetics that, while many composers believed twelve-tone and post-war serial practices were historically determined, they also embraced the technique as a new beginning. In the post-war period, one of the central concerns of serial composers was to find a new approach to composition, something very different from tonal music. Their motivation for doing so was substantially influenced by extra-musical factors. In 1933, for example, the inventor of the twelve-tone method was stripped of his professorship in Berlin, and his scores were publicly burned in front of the national opera house. Schoenberg’s Jewish background and his role as a leading modernist artist made him doubly offensive to the Nazi regime and earned him a place in their infamous ‘degenerate art’ exhibition (Hinton 1993: 101 and 106). This made his twelve-tone method very appealing to post-war composers, for it seemed ‘untainted by any whiff of collaboration’ and was thought to represent ‘intransigence and resistance’ (Kapp 1988: 13). Leibowitz associated it with the freedom of the human spirit and worked secretly with it during the war years. He published five books and fifteen articles about it immediately after, and these publications were a significant part of the post-war reception of twelvetone music (Shreffler 2000: 33–5). Nazi cultural policies seemed to be repeated in communist countries of the Eastern bloc only a few years after the end of the war, and this gave additional impetus to the appeal of serialism. When the Soviet’s Division of Propaganda officially denounced ‘formalism’ in 1948, which included twelve-tone music, and promoted socialist realism, many artists and ‘supporters of the avant-garde saw a clear analogy between the repressions of the Third Reich and those of Stalin’ (Kovács 1997a: 117). More recently,
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scholars have shown that serial music was in fact practised in many parts of the Eastern bloc and even supported by some socialist governments. But Western observers at the time saw direct parallels between communism and National Socialism regarding the condemnation and prohibition of particular techniques and figures in modernist music. Western governments responded to this by increasing their support for modernist art. The Darmstadt New Music Courses, for example, which were founded in 1946 to help promote music banned by the Nazi regime, became a centre for the promotion of music prohibited in the East and a beacon for compositional approaches such as serialism, which was thought to represent the values of Western democracies (Kovács 1997b). Those values are apparent in the central themes of serial aesthetics outlined here: progress, freedom, rationality, and, as we will see, superior science and technology. Serialism represented freedom not only in a political sense, but also in a technical sense, and this is another paradox of serial aesthetics. To understand how such a highly rationalised and strictly controlled approach to composition could represent freedom in this way, one must consider the role that science and technology had in reinventing music from what were thought to be the most basic elements of sound.
Science and Technology Although not terribly relevant for the aesthetics of Schoenberg and his students, science and technology were absolutely essential for post-war serial composers. Looking again at Example 2 from Ligeti, in which he described the historical development of serialism in Western Europe, one will find a specific term to which the serial idea was applied: the ‘parameters’ of pitch, duration, intensity, and timbre. The term ‘parameter’ was taken directly from contemporaneous research being done in electroacoustic music studios, and it represented the nucleus of post-war serial composition. It was first applied to serial music by the composer and theorist Karlheinz Stockhausen, who used it in 1953 to describe the pitches, durations, intensities, and timbres of his composition Kontra-Punkte (Blumröder 1995; cf. Stockhausen 1963a: 37). Stockhausen acquired the term from Werner Meyer-Eppler, a leading researcher in electronic music, whom he met in 1952 and with whom he studied (Blumröder 1995: 335). But Stockhausen acquired much more than terminology from electronic music studios; he also acquired his very conception of music there, a conception of music dependent upon the kind of analysis and synthesis of sound enabled by studio work. In early electronic music studios, sounds
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were understood to consist of four component elements: frequency (or pitch), duration (which generated rhythm), intensity (or dynamics), and waveform (or timbre); these became the parameters to which composers then applied serial techniques in their effort to advance history beyond the pitch-only serialism of Schoenberg. These individual components of sound were also the focus of work being done by composers in the United States, such as Milton Babbitt. Babbitt had a background in mathematics, did pioneering work in early electronicsound studios, made extensive contributions to music theory, and had a tremendous influence on the development of music composition and theory as academic disciplines. In a widely read essay from 1958, he compared the serial music of the time to physics and mathematics and argued that, like these disciplines, music needed the support of universities to ensure its further progress (Babbitt 1958). Electronic music studios on both sides of the Atlantic, and elsewhere, enabled composers to create any sound or structure imaginable, or at least they promised to do so. This, in turn, supported the desire to create a new music unrelated to the past, and it imparted a sense of freedom limited only by the capacity for invention. Post-war serialism was an expression of this creative freedom.
The Idea of the Experiment As post-war composers reinvented music without the traditional syntax and forms of tonality, they often conceived of individual pieces as experiments that furthered their research. The concept of composition as experimentation was, according to the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus, ‘nothing less than the fundamental aesthetic paradigm of serial and postserial music’ in the 1950s and 1960s (Dahlhaus 1983b: 84). Dahlhaus was uniquely placed to make this assessment: he was one of the most prolific and influential music scholars of the twentieth century; he knew post-war music at first hand and wrote extensively about it; and his knowledge of the history of aesthetics was unparalleled among musicologists. His idea of an aesthetic paradigm of experimentation consisted of three complementary elements that he believed characterised serial and post-serial music in Western Europe after the war: first, a philosophy of history dependent upon ideas from Adorno’s writings; second, the idea of a ‘problem-history’ of composition that unfolded in a way analogous to the history of science; and finally, the idea of a ‘work-in-progress’ that replaced the nineteenth-century work-concept of a closed, perfected whole (Dahlhaus 1983b: 82–85).
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Adorno’s philosophy of history should now be familiar: a quoted passage from his Philosophy of New Music and my detailed explication of it appear above (pp. 22–5). Adorno had a significant influence on post-war serial composers, even if they did not understand his philosophy with the nuance and erudition it deserved (see Zagorski 2005 for a reception history). What they took from his writing was the idea that not all musical materials are available to composers at any given time; rather, a composer is ‘required’ to work with only those materials history dictates to be appropriate. Dahlhaus was critical of this idea, and he thereby criticised historical metanarratives long before so-called ‘new musicologists’ did. But he recognised how this particular narrative did much to shape music history. Adorno’s philosophy of history led post-war composers to believe that serialism was a ‘logical consequence of history’, and I have shown already that Ligeti, Boulez, Nono, and Schnebel, among others, held this view. These composers saw it as their task to find the next ‘logical consequence of history’, and Dahlhaus argued that this caused them to view music history as a ‘problem-history’ of composition. In such a ‘problem-history’, each new approach to composition was thought to be a solution to problems found in the preceding approach, and each new approach created new problems that required further solutions and generated new techniques. Dahlhaus drew parallels between this problem-history and the history of science, specifically, the theory of ‘normal science’ presented in Thomas Kuhn’s influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1996; for the Dahlhaus comparison, see Dahlhaus 1983b: 83). But there are even clearer links to Stockhausen’s writings. In the essay ‘Erfindung und Entdeckung: Ein Beitrag zur Form-Genese’, for example, Stockhausen interpreted his own compositions from the 1950s as a series of problems begetting solutions, and he illustrated this idea with nearly twenty pages of examples from his scores (Stockhausen 1963b). Because Stockhausen was an exact contemporary of Dahlhaus and perhaps the most influential serial composer and theorist in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s, it seems likely that Dahlhaus was influenced, at least in part, by his writings. Dahlhaus argued that the second element in his theory of the experiment, the ‘problem-history’ of composition, led to the third element of his theory, the idea of a musical work as a ‘work-in-progress’. The ‘work-in-progress’, he claimed, had great relevance to the history of music aesthetics, for it represented a counter-concept to the nineteenth-century ideal of a closed musical work: when new compositions were conceived primarily as solutions to problems posed by earlier compositions, no individual piece formed
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a closed whole but was only an incomplete part of a larger series of works. This idea of a ‘work-in-progress’ also can be linked to the writings of postwar serial composers. In this case, it is again Stockhausen who wrote in the early 1950s of the need to overturn the older ideal of a closed, perfected work in favour of something that would stand as a small part of a larger process (see Stockhausen 1963a; Stockhausen 1963i). Later in that decade, Ligeti made similar statements: in his well-known analysis of Boulez’s Structure Ia, he described composing as a kind of research and experimentation that surrendered the claim to produce great works, and he argued that all composers must think this way if they hope to effect progress (Ligeti 1958: 62–3). Dahlhaus read the writings of serial composers and interpreted them in the context of the larger history of music aesthetics. His erudition and insights about the relation between compositional theory and intellectual history make his work uniquely valuable.
Unity and Organicism Essays about compositional theory were the primary vehicle for serial aesthetics, and extracting aesthetic content from these essays requires one to see links between descriptions of compositional techniques and the aesthetic ideals that motivated them. There was an explosion of compositional theory in the post-war period, which followed from the desire of composers to reinvent music from the ground up. And as with the twelve-tone method itself, the precedent for prolific prose-writing was Schoenberg. In his essay ‘Composition with Twelve Tones’, Schoenberg explained not only how he used the technique, but also why. ‘Form in the arts, and especially in music’, he wrote, ‘aims primarily at comprehensibility. . . . Composition with twelve tones has no other aim than comprehensibility’ (Schoenberg 1975a: 215). For Schoenberg, the twelve-tone method supported the comprehensibility of his musical ideas by providing a consistency of intervallic relations and unified pitch structure that corresponded with phrasing and formal ideas. The method was therefore essentially connected to his decisions about form, and the basic set created a unifying force that reflected an organicist ideal of composition. Post-war composers shared this organicist ideal, but, strangely, they criticised Schoenberg for not going far enough with it. Boulez led the charge, claiming that Schoenberg ‘took no trouble to find specifically serial structures’ in his music and ‘never concerned himself with the logical connection between serial forms as such and derived structure’ (Boulez 1991f: 213). Boulez overlooked Schoenberg’s insistence that ‘the
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possibilities of evolving the formal elements of music . . . out of a basic set are unlimited’ and ploughed ahead with his own programme (Schoenberg 1975a: 222). That programme was, he wrote, to generate ‘structure from material’ by ‘generaliz[ing] the serial principle to the four constituents of sound: pitch, duration, dynamics/attack, and timbre’ (Boulez 1991f: 214). The results of Boulez’s organicist ideal took shape in his Structure Ia. Stockhausen also wrote, with an insistence that bordered on fanaticism, of the need to compose according to a unifying principle, and he repeatedly demanded ‘consistency’ between individual elements and the totality. In sentence after sentence of a technical essay on early serialism, ‘Situation des Handwerks (Kriterien der punktuellen Musik)’, he called for the ‘subordination of tones under a unifying principle’, for ‘consistency between the ordering of the individual elements and the whole’, for a ‘unified conception of music, which only a unified material ordering can create’, for ‘the constant presence of the unifying idea’, and for ‘the necessity of total order’ (Stockhausen 1963e). The language here is striking given that Hitler had just inflicted a period of ‘total order’ on Europe. It is a language echoed in Boulez’s statement that his intention with Structure Ia was to create a synthesis of elements that ‘would not be marred from the start by foreign bodies’ (Boulez, quoted in Toop 1974: 144). The ‘foreign bodies’ were the remnants of the tonal tradition he detected in Schoenberg’s work, and like many others, he believed a more robust organicism would allow composers to move forward. This belief extended far beyond Boulez and Stockhausen and was one of the primary concerns of serialism.
Perception and Listening As Boulez and other post-war composers expunged the ‘foreign bodies’ of tonality from their music, they also abandoned a syntax that was familiar to listeners. Schoenberg and his students claimed that traditional syntax was not so much abandoned as made ‘more efficient’. But in both cases, and seemingly with all serial music, new demands are made upon the listener. In Schoenberg’s music, traditional syntax struggles to compensate for the novelty of the new pitch structure. In the music of Boulez and other postwar composers, conventions of both syntax and pitch are effectively abolished and replaced by a new idea of what music and listening can be. Comparing one of Schoenberg’s early twelve-tone pieces, such as the Intermezzo from his Suite for Piano op. 25, with Boulez’s early serial piece, Structure Ia, provides a good example of this: immediately apparent is a difference in the textural conception of the pieces. Whereas in
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Schoenberg the hierarchy of parts common to tonal music since the classical era persists, in Boulez there is no such hierarchy, no distinction between primary and subsidiary voices or melody and accompaniment. The texture is characterised instead by a scattering of ‘points’ across sound-space, which helps makes sense of why such music was described as ‘pointillistic’ at the time. Additionally, the sound environment of Structure Ia is static rather than dynamic or goal-oriented; this is an intended result caused by the obliteration of metre, lack of registral focus, and unchanging loudness and articulation – to say nothing of pitch. The new demands serialism placed upon listeners were noted repeatedly by Babbitt in the essay by him cited above. He argued that because serial composers could determine musical events with greater precision, listeners needed to listen with greater precision in order to correctly perceive the music (cf. Babbitt 1958). This may be true in the case of Babbitt’s music, but there are many other ways of listening to serial music, just as there are many other serial composers. What is appropriate for one is not necessarily appropriate for all. Stockhausen can serve as a useful counterexample to Babbitt, for he also wrote specifically about how to listen to new music but took a very different position. Stockhausen argued that listeners could approach music with a spirit of ‘invention’ and a spirit of ‘discovery’. To apply ‘invention’ to listening is to actively devise form for music, to respond creatively to what is heard and give it structure. The essential point is that there need not be one form that is identified by all listeners; rather, the same music can generate different formal ideas in different listeners. This approach suggests a departure from the conventional practice of listening, in which known formal parts are identified similarly by different listeners. What is more important for Stockhausen is that each listener perceive the music personally and creatively. ‘Discovery’ in listening, on the other hand, does not allow for this creative engagement with form but urges listeners to accept forms that are unusual and unfamiliar. For Stockhausen, new musical ‘discoveries’ require listeners to accept and devote attention to that which is unconventional. He was critical of listeners who were intolerant of unfamiliar structures, and he deemed them poor discoverers (see Stockhausen 1963b: 226–7; cf. Zagorski 2018). If one considers the hostility with which serial and post-serial music has been received at times (not infrequently by musicians and music scholars themselves), one can better understand this entreaty for tolerance. But the fact remains that listening to serial music has been considered difficult by the majority of those who have heard serial music. One must therefore
The Aesthetics of Serialism
wonder how serialism could become one of the most influential compositional techniques of the twentieth century.
The Influence of Serial Aesthetics The influence of serialism was due in large part to the ideas behind the technique – in other words, to its aesthetics. It was, of course, music to be listened to, even when it required new kinds of listening. But more so than perhaps any other music, it was the ideas associated with serialism that contributed to its widespread practice. The themes in the aesthetics of serialism outlined in this chapter reflect the features of its influence, and behind them lie different conceptions of progress. For Schoenberg and his students, progress lay in a new method for ordering pitch that fulfilled their need for formal cohesion and seemed the culmination of hundreds of years of prior practices. For post-war composers, serialism represented the new beginning that was wanted after the period of fascism, elevated a technique the fascists condemned, and also seemed the logical consequence of earlier musical progress. During the Cold War, in both East and West, the modernism and abstraction of serial music were considered to be the polar opposite of Socialist Realism, and they lent serialism the prestige of (mostly) forbidden culture on one side of the Iron Curtain while representing the ideals of freedom and democracy on both sides. Finally, serial music’s development in the 1950s and 1960s was made possible by the science and technology that defined the era and promised unlimited creative freedom through the electronic generation of sound. The influence of serial aesthetics can be seen also in critical reactions against it. Given the great influence of serialism, its geographical scope, variety of practices, and staying power, it has attracted countless critiques. Those critiques particularly worth mentioning are two compositional trends that fashioned themselves as antipodes to serialism, and which became two of the most influential compositional approaches since 1970: spectral music and minimalism. The ideas that motivated these approaches can be usefully contrasted with ideas that motivated serial composers.
Closing Thoughts Despite the abundance of critiques, and because of them, serialism has been an important part of the music and aesthetics of the past hundred years. It can also contribute to a better understanding of modernism and the many
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cultures that participated in its ideals. Those many cultures, the long history of serialism, and the richness of its aesthetics suggest myriad ways to approach the topic. One can, for example, examine local contexts that focus on particular times, places, institutions, composers, theorists, or political conditions. Or one can combine this with broader historical interpretations linking artistic practices to the beliefs and motives that underpin human behaviour and elucidate the metanarratives we construct. These metanarratives may be out of fashion today, but they are still worth studying; the same can be said of serialism. I hope this chapter has shown that the aesthetics of serialism is an extremely rich and intellectually stimulating topic. It is also a historical fact that, whatever we may think of the music and its aesthetics, it had a tremendous influence on the twentieth century and continues to be influential in the twenty-first century. Its legacy lives on not only in its critics, but also in generations of composers who, long after the heyday of serialism in the post-war period, continue to be guided by its ideas.
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Serialism in History and Criticism arnold whittall
What Happened When An early account of what became known as serial composition can be traced to 1923, when the composer Josef Matthias Hauer published a text called Treatise on Twelve-Tone Technique: The Nature of Musicality (Lehrbuch der Zwölftontechnik: von Wesen des Musikalischen). A year later another important feature of musical modernism was pinpointed in a book by Herbert Eimert called Theory of Atonal Music (Atonale Musiklehre). Both titles seem to reflect a concern to promote musical characteristics that were starkly opposed to the familiar notion of tonality, of something sacred to the great masters of the past: just as ‘atonal’ implied the absolute negation of tonality, so ‘twelve-tone technique’ might appear to imply the absolute negation of tonality’s ‘seven-tone technique’, the drawing of tonally functional chords and relationships from the diatonic major or minor scales, coupled with commitment to the time-honoured distinction between consonance and dissonance. All these technical terms – tonal, atonal, twelve-tone technique – have musical connotations that are more direct than those relating to ‘serialism’, simply because the essential concept of ‘tone’ (as reflected in dictionary definitions) is musical where that of ‘series’ is not. It is also because from the outset twelve-tone technique depended on deriving the entire compositional texture from twelve pitch classes arranged in a fixed linear sequence, and any ‘fixed linear sequence’ in tonal composition was likely to be primarily motivic or thematic in character, and not directly reproduced in other strands of the texture. Such a fundamental difference began to be explored in technical writing like Hauer’s and Eimert’s more or less at the same time as composers were beginning to write serially. But it could never be taken for granted that ‘composition with twelve tones’ was also, by definition, atonal. Twelve-tone serial composition, like other kinds of modernist and often expressionist music, might be less securely tonal than much music written before 1900. But fundamental vestiges of tonal thinking and tonal procedure stubbornly resisted all avant-garde attempts to eradicate them.
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As my initial reference to Hauer shows, Arnold Schoenberg was not the only musician in the early twentieth century to have intuitions about the need for, and nature of, an organising principle that would facilitate a properly modern character for the creation of compositions fit to stand alongside the greatest achievements of the past. Nevertheless, his preeminence during the early years of music’s twelve-tone phase is entirely understandable, given the quality of his pre-serial works, and also his role as teacher and mentor to several of the first generation of twelve-tone composers, including Alban Berg and Anton Webern. It was in July 1923 that Schoenberg, at the age of forty-eight, finished his first completely twelve-tone serial work, the Suite for Piano op. 25. Over the next twenty-eight years, most of the compositions he worked on were twelve-tone, and this body of music is striking, among much else, for the degree to which it compensates for his avoidance of such standard generic titles as string quartet and concerto during the fifteen years between 1908 and 1923. In the 1920s, many of Schoenberg’s pupils followed his lead, not just into twelve-tone serialism, but in aiming to demonstrate that this new method of composition was not simply an intransigent, destructive avantgarde initiative. Rather, it offered an innovative approach to texture and design that grew organically out of the increasing chromaticism and intricate motivic processes of much nineteenth-century music. Above all, it could be felt to offer invigorating discipline at a time when use of traditional procedures was difficult to distinguish from dull and derivative recycling of jaded tonal clichés. In the 1950s, it would become a familiar claim that the twelve-tone compositions of Schoenberg and his followers were less radical, less obliquely aphoristic, than such examples of post-tonal, pre-serial expressionism as Schoenberg’s Erwartung (1909) and Pierrot lunaire (1912) or the various sets of miniatures written by Webern between 1908 and 1916. In addition, as historians have often observed, one should never underestimate the consequences of the fact that, although the basic language of music appeared to change radically between 1900 and 1930, and twelvetone compositions were at the forefront of such changes, the nature of voices and instruments, and of the institutions that preserved and promoted serious music within society, remained much as it had been since well before 1900. It was only after the middle of the twentieth century that new ways of making sound, especially recording on tape and the subsequent transformation of analogue into digital technology, began to influence not just the dissemination of music, but compositional methods as well. Yet the result, far from turning into a complete and unrelenting
Serialism in History and Criticism
rethinking of compositional principles, turned out rather to favour the kind of intensely heterogeneous range of styles and techniques that has characterised contemporary music over the past half century. The radical shifts and reshapings of the concept of serialism that can be detected during the early post-war years proved to be no more permanent or alldetermining than any other innovative initiative of that time.
Serial Materials Twelve-tone serial technique was multiple rather than singular from the beginning; it proposed basing pitch materials not simply on a single succession of all twelve semitones of the chromatic scale, but on the forty-eight such successions that become available when the principal or basic series form is transposed onto the other eleven pitch levels, and when its inversion, retrograde (reversion), and retrograde inversion are similarly transposed (see Figure 1.1). As a result, twelve-tone composition involved the constant shifting or transformation of the original twelve-tone series ordering, as various inversions and reversions of that ordering were deployed. There was nevertheless no prior expectation that a twelve-tone serial composition required the equal use of all these distinct series forms, and compositional practice soon brought another important matter to light: while equality – ensuring that the in-built pitch hierarchies of tonal scales and themes were avoided – might be a theoretical ideal, such absolute equality was difficult to achieve in practice and even more difficult to imbue with musical life. The later initiative to interpret serial multiplicity as applying the other elements beside pitch, as demonstrated with special consistency and resourcefulness by Milton Babbitt after 1940, has been widely studied but has not so far swayed the broad currents of compositional development in its direction. What amounts with Babbitt to a highly specialised kind of atonal athematicism remains a rarely acquired taste, and a rarely followed model. In the formative years of pitch serialism, the 1920s and 1930s, using several ordered series forms at once, or combining vertical with linear presentations of series segments, also meant that there could be a considerable difference between the ordered successions of series forms visible in a printed collection of set tables or matrices and the pitch materials sounding in the actual score. With this fundamental distinction between theory and practice, twelve-tone serialism became a liberating rather than constraining principle; so (for Schoenberg in particular) the most immediate result of the method’s
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formulation was to make it possible to conceive and complete works on a larger scale than he had managed between 1909 and 1923. Serial technique could be employed for vocal as well as instrumental music, for opera or oratorio as well as for Lieder and other smaller-scale texted pieces. Indeed, serial music was no more inherently anti-lyrical than it was anti-classical. At the same time, however, it could share with the other strands of musical modernism during the years between 1920 and 1950 an openness to expressionistic, late Romantic, and neoclassical expressive tendencies. As noted earlier, twelve-tone serialism appeared by definition to be ‘antitonal’, requiring ‘total’ chromaticism and therefore the complete and unambiguous absence of consonant diatonicism. But just as the attraction of dividing the twelve notes up into smaller groups of six, four, or three to bring out possible thematic/motivic similarities between these subgroups soon became a common procedure for early serial compositions, so did approaches to harmony and counterpoint that stopped short of incontrovertible atonality. While the more folkloric melodic qualities found in the music of Janáček, Sibelius, or Vaughan Williams did not transfer naturally to serialism, it was perfectly possible to use a folk-like melody as the source for a set of twelve-tone variations on a simple tonal theme, as a movement from Schoenberg’s Suite op. 29 (1924–6) showed (cf. Whittall 2008: 58–60). No less prescient, for the longer-term evolutionary history of serialism, was Alban Berg’s quotation of a Styrian folk tune in the final stages of his Violin Concerto (1935), making audible the link between the tune’s artless diatonicism and the triadic interval-content of the work’s twelve-tone series without attempting to contrive a literal, unifying process of connection between folk tune and series form. Even more startling was Berg’s incorporation of a complete chorale, ‘Es ist genug’, as harmonised by J. S. Bach, in the concerto’s finale. The first four notes of the chorale melody – the wholetone ascent B♭, C, D, E – formed the last four notes of the work’s twelvetone series. But the music makes abundantly clear that, as an exemplary modernist, Berg was more interested in the poignant disparity between Bach’s original and his own twelve-tone fantasia on and around that original than he was in contriving an ideally integrated synthesis between the two.
Describing Serial Designs Between 1945 and 1951, only the ageing, ailing Schoenberg survived from the original twelve-tone triumvirate, and to the end he remained as reluctant to contrive verbal justifications for his compositional
Serialism in History and Criticism
decisions as he was to teach the ‘rules’ of serialism to his students. He was never likely to provide a triumphalist slice of autobiography, recalling the euphoria of the early 1920s when he moved so quickly from demonstrating the new method’s ability to transform traditional smallscale dance forms in the Suite op. 25 to the fully symphonic scale of its immediate successor, the Wind Quintet op. 26 (1923–4), and then advancing further within the next four years not only to the elaborate orchestral textures of the Variations for Orchestra (1926–8) but also to making plans for very different operas – the mildly comic Von heute auf morgen (1928–9), the weightily tragic Moses und Aron (1930–2). Euphoria might also account for Schoenberg’s confidence that the works he found so rewarding to conceive and complete would also excite audiences, that the urgent expressiveness consequent on transforming abstract serial materials into living sound would reinvigorate a musical world in serious danger of being lulled into apathy by what he saw as Stravinsky’s effete neoclassicism, reaching its nadir in diversions with titles such as The Fairy’s Kiss (1928/50) and The Card Game (1936–37). Such concerns may explain the sense of urgency with which Schoenberg sought to move beyond the satisfying but restricted and not exactly un-neoclassical scope of that first completely twelve-tone composition, the Suite for Piano op. 25. There, the explicit associations between his own movement titles and textures and the movement titles and textures of Bach’s keyboard suites seemed specifically intended to help performers and listeners comprehend this music as music, irrespective of its purely technical innovations. A Schoenberg twelve-tone canon would be more dissonant than a Bach canon, a Schoenberg Musette would have a rather different relation between a repeated pitch or interval in the bass and what sounded above it to a Bach Musette, but there could be a fundamental and audible identity between the textures and styles of twelve-tone and tonality-based forms. And despite the occasional tendency of critics to disparage Schoenberg’s initiative as merely presenting ‘wrong-note’ versions of something that, in Bach, sounds both natural and right from beginning to end, Schoenberg persisted in his conviction that what serialism made possible was not a distortion of tradition but a valuable and inspiring transformation of tradition, a much-needed reinvigoration of an increasingly moribund musical language. Reluctant though Schoenberg was to theorise verbally about things best left, in his view, to the aesthetic discrimination of the listening mind, his 1941 essay, ‘Composition with Twelve Tones’, discussed aspects of his first large-scale serial piece, the Wind Quintet op. 26 in ways that transparently
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build bridges between serial techniques and pre-serial formal and harmonic characteristics, such as modulation: ‘while a piece usually begins with the basic set itself, the mirror forms and other derivatives, such as the eleven transpositions of all the four basic forms, are applied only later; the transpositions, like the modulations in former styles, serve to build subordinate ideas’ (Schoenberg 1975a: 227). As the essay’s accompanying music examples show, it was easy enough to see how the relevant series forms, represented as successions of integers or letter names, translated into the pitches of a polyphonic texture clearly stratified between melody and accompaniment. A decade earlier, Anton Webern had risked an even simpler and more direct explanation of similarities and differences between old and new musics. First, difference was focused on the extent to which traditional terminology, predicated on the hierarchic characters of the tonal system, no longer applied: ‘considerations of symmetry, regularity are now to the fore, as against the emphasis formerly laid on the principal intervals – dominant, subdominant, mediant, etc. For this reason the middle of the octave – the diminished fifth – is now important.’ Then came similarity: ‘for the rest one works as before. The original form and pitch of the row occupy a position akin to that of the “main key” in earlier music, the recapitulation will naturally return to it. We end in the same key! The analogy with earlier formal construction is quite consciously fostered: here we find the path that will lead us again to extended forms’ (Webern 1963: 54). There have been many objections to Webern’s breezy and artlessly oversimplifying assurances down the years, especially to his claim that the diminished fifth – despite lacking the foundational acoustic functions of those ‘principal intervals’ in the well-tempered harmonic series – could nevertheless have a comparable structural importance. But his basic instinct, to emphasise that a degree of ‘invariance’ – recurrences leading to the perception that some elements in the music are structurally more important than others – mattered in twelve-tone serial music as much as they did in tonal compositions. In both cases, comprehension by ear and mind was the result of musical thinking that was, in essence, hierarchic. Nevertheless, by 1931–2, when Webern made these comments, he had already shown in his String Trio op. 20 (1927), Symphony op. 21 (1927– 8), and Quartet op. 22 (1928–30) how difficult it was for highly contrapuntal instrumental compositions using the twelve-tone method to be heard in exactly the same way as compositions with key signatures and bass lines emphasising chordal roots and key notes. And whereas
Serialism in History and Criticism
Schoenberg’s serial textures unusually involved thematic materials shaped melodically, so that developmental transformations and varied repetitions or recapitulations could still, with practice, be aurally distinguished from each other, Webern’s much more concentrated motivic tapestries had a consistency whose potential for aural recognition involved a sense of constant focus around a few basic intervals, like the semitone and major third (and their compounds) in the first movement of the Concerto for Nine Instruments op. 24 (1931–4). Begun around the time of the lecture just quoted, the op. 24 Concerto could have been specifically designed to demonstrate how a serial composition could be coherent even if analogies ‘with earlier formal constructions’ dependent on the concept of ‘key’ are more metaphorical than literal. The earlier formal feature that remains present in Webern is the motive, the brief cell of pitches and intervals whose ‘developing variation’ proved crucial to the music’s ability to communicate a tightly organised thematic discourse whose emphasis on easily audible motivic invariants compensated for the absence of prolonged tonal functioning (cf. Schoenberg 1995: 365). ‘Developing variation’ was a concept that Schoenberg-the-teacher deduced from the practice of tonal composers from (at least) Bach to Brahms, and it was flexible enough to fit Webern’s short motivic cells as well as Schoenberg’s own more expansively melodic ideas. It also provided the best guarantee that a serial composition would have a distinctive and engaging musical character, a ‘personality’ that might be in constant evolution but could convey a coherent and connected narrative, however much contrast and divergence might occur along the way. A case can be made for the argument that, from the 1970s onwards, developing variation of recognisable motivic elements, as found in Webern and Berg as well as Schoenberg, proved to be the principal legacy of earlier serial practice to continue within the diverse procedures of late modernism. However, for the Babbitts and Boulezs of the years in the immediate aftermath of their exposure to twelve-tone music’s initial phase, developing variation was little more than evidence of neoclassical nostalgia, the desire to write old music in a different way rather than truly new music.
Method, System, Meanings By the mid-1940s – obviously a time of seismic upheaval on the world stage – the possibility of serialising musical features such as duration, dynamic level, registral position, and mode of articulation were being
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explored not only by Milton Babbitt in the United States but also by Olivier Messiaen in France. Both believed that it was a positive step forward to extend the concept of serial multiplicity represented by the forty-eight possible versions of twelve-tone pitch-class series forms, as one way of achieving greater distance from what seemed to some the frankly regressive qualities of Berg’s Violin Concerto or Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon (1942). In his short piano piece, ‘Mode de valeurs et d’intensités’, Messiaen used three twelve-tone sequences (treated as unordered collections, or modes, rather than fixed series forms) projected with different (shorter) series of durations, dynamics, and articulation. Messiaen worked on the piece during his visit to the Darmstadt New Music Courses in 1949, and Martin Iddon has provided a detailed study of that institution during the years when several younger composers and pupils of Messiaen, including Pierre Boulez, Michel Fano, Karel Goeyvaerts, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, tried out different ways of working with kinds of multiple serialism involving stricter ordering principles than Messiaen had employed (Iddon 2013). While these composers knew enough of Berg and Schoenberg to conclude that both had compromised the serial principle rather than developing its true potential, it was with Webern, as they gradually grew more familiar with scores not widely available in published form until the 1950s, that a genuinely inspiring ‘path to the new music’ was revealed. For Boulez, in particular, Webern’s shunning of expressionistic flamboyance in his twelve-tone works, coupled with the avoidance of traditional harmonic allusions and (in certain contexts) strict control of relations between pitch, duration, dynamic, and register, was sufficient compensation for his retention of clearly defined motivic materials that could obey the precepts of Schoenberg’s model for compositional coherence rooted in the developing variation of such motives. In the second half of the 1940s, when he was in his early twenties, Pierre Boulez had written music that was not exactly anti-Schoenbergian or antiBergian in its allusions to sonata and other traditional forms and in its explosively expressionistic tone of voice. But by 1950, it would seem to Boulez and others that victory in the hard-fought battles of early modernism, which had seen diatonic tonality overthrown and thematicism itself called into question, had been betrayed by a failure of will, or imagination, on the part of the victors-turned-law-givers, with their serial sonatas, symphonies, and concertos. There is therefore a neat equivalence between the critical claim that the first phase of twelve-tone composition was insufficiently alive to the innovative potential of serialism as a principle
Serialism in History and Criticism
to transform the character of compositional invention, and the no less familiar critical claim that the integral or multiple serialism represented by works like Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel (1951) or Boulez’s Structure Ia (1951– 2) imposed such elaborate mechanisms on composing that it deprived music of those communicative essentials that had sustained it during many centuries of continuous stylistic and technical evolution up to the present. Opinion remains divided as to whether, from the 1970s onwards, Boulez and his contemporaries retreated into techniques closer to those of the original pitch-only serialists, or whether they advanced into a newly flexible kind of serial thinking that was nevertheless still more systematic in principle than that of the inter-war pioneers. Many composers were impressed by Stravinsky’s boldness, during the 1950s, in transforming himself into the inheritor of a serialism inspired primarily by Webern’s intense austerity yet finding a new degree of flexibility in building matrices of series forms on the principle of transformational rotation rather than simply transposition. This was a kind of multiplicity that Boulez would adopt after 1970, as Stravinsky’s own career was coming to an end. As seen earlier, Stravinsky had been nothing if not critical of both Schoenberg and Berg during his earlier neoclassical years, but knowledge of and enthusiasm for Webern, facilitated by the performances of his assistant Robert Craft, made possible the kind of commitment to twelvetone thinking shown in one of his earliest reported exchanges with Craft, first published in 1959. rc: Do you think that the masterpieces of the next decade will be composed in serial technique? is: Nothing is likely about masterpieces, least of all whether there will be any. Nevertheless, a masterpiece is more likely to happen to the composer with the most highly developed language. This language is serial at present and though our contemporary development of it could be tangential to an evolution we do not yet see, this doesn’t matter. Its resources have enlarged the present language and changed our perspective on it. Developments in language are not abandoned, and the composer who fails to take account of them may lose the mainstream. Masterpieces aside, it seems to me the new music will be serial. (Stravinsky and Craft 1959: 131)
Stravinsky and Craft doubtless had the recent serial ‘masterpieces’ of the 1950s in mind here – they mention Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître (1953– 5) and Stockhausen’s Gruppen (1955–7). Today, such works are probably best thought of as signalling the transition from the purest possible
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multiple serialism to something more like ‘post-serialism’ – music which both acknowledged and countered serial thinking, just as post-tonal music was both acknowledging and countering the rich heritage of tonality. The decade from 1956 to 1966, which marked Stravinsky’s own most productive engagement with serialism, saw Boulez and Stockhausen loosening serial strictness further in response to new initiatives in electronics and Cageian experimentalism. Thereafter the inevitable serial polarity between ordered and ‘unordered’ elements would contribute to a phase of late modernism notable for its independence of Schoenbergian alignments with classical forms and textures. For Babbitt, Schoenberg’s retrograde stylistic tendencies in his twelvetone compositions mattered far less than his distinctive structuring method of combining pairs of transpositionally related twelve-tone series forms (most commonly P0/I5 – the Piano Piece op. 33a being a ‘textbook’ instance) in which each of the superimposed hexachords contained six different pitch classes, laid stimulating foundations for the aggregate constructions and other refinements of Babbitt’s serial practice (cf. Babbitt 1987b: 63–84). For Boulez and his European colleagues, it was Webern’s pointillistic foreshadowing of a kind of serialism in which individual pitches were given fixed registral positions and unique dynamics and modes of articulation, then disposed symmetrically above and below a central axis, as shown in the second movement of the Variations for Piano op. 27, that suggested the best way forward, into a new world in which the serial principle was all-pervasive, all-determining, and ‘composing as before’ was anathema. With the caustic confidence of youth, Pierre Boulez accused the recently deceased Schoenberg of a desire ‘to reconstitute tonal language within the dodecaphonic system. Witness the Ode to Napoleon, whose feebleness of thought and poverty of execution are completely typical’ (Boulez 1991h: 199). To listen today to the opening of Boulez’s Structure Ia for two pianos (1951–2) is to encounter pure musical intransigence: atonal, athematic, expressionistically assertive as it strides boldly across its predetermined space, the two instruments sharing in a fractured yet interdependent discourse, the sustained contrast between their initial dynamic extremes an early indication that divergence, resistance to integration, was central to the music’s avant-garde aesthetic. This music embodied a no less intransigent critique of Boulez’s principal teacher Messiaen, since it adopted one of the twelve-tone modes of ‘Mode de valeurs et d’intensités’ only to subject it to far more systematically ordered serial treatment than Messiaen himself had employed. For Boulez a ‘yawning chasm had opened up’ between the infrastructure of
Serialism in History and Criticism
tonality and a ‘language whose organisational principles are as yet dimly perceived’ (Boulez 1991f: 212). The problem for the would-be systematic, multiple (or integral) serialists would prove to be that ‘organisational principles’ in which not just pitch but as many different parameters of the music as possible were subject to serialisation would remain ‘dimly perceived’, and soon come to seem even less appealing, even less convincing, than what Schoenberg and Webern had offered. Boulez would remain committed to the belief that serialism represented ‘a complete reaction against classical thought’; that ‘classical tonal thought is based on a universe defined by gravity and attraction, serial thought on a universe in continuous expansion’ (Boulez 1991c: 236). Nevertheless, this polarity would be tempered by conceding the fundamental need for compositions to communicate, and therefore to contain ‘recognisable musical objects’, a ‘new thematicism’ that amounted to a retreat from avant-garde extremism to modernist moderation (cf. Goldman 2011: 56–79; Whittall 2008: 203–9). Only on the rare occasions when integral serial composers chose highly emotive subject matter rather than purely structural processes as their material might such a composition manage to attract an audience beyond the intrepid devotees of the most demanding kind of new music – Luigi Nono’s Il canto sospeso (1955–6), with its eloquent treatment of texts from martyrs of the wartime Italian resistance, is a telling instance. In practice, therefore, the grandly comprehensive matrices or magic squares of mutually interdependent lines of up to twelve integers, whose numbers could be translated into ordered sets of different durations, dynamics, and modes of attack as well as pitch classes, tended to move further into the background of compositional process and decision-making – a source from which appropriate selections might be made rather than an inviolable and all-determining grid imposing its rigorous discipline on all aspects of the musical material, and on the resulting listening experience.
Critics and Composers As an activity applicable to musical composition, criticism has a much longer history than serialism, implying as it does a considered, written response to composers and their works. Critical criteria are notoriously elusive, rooted in feelings and psychological predispositions as much as in consciously crafted intellectual convictions. Even the greatest composers have their detractors, although with the likes of Bach and Beethoven these will be a tiny minority, and for the majority who approve, the ‘end’ of compositional effect is likely
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to be of more immediate concern than the ‘means’ of compositional technique or method, despite the ease with which both qualities can be brought together under the capacious heading of ‘style’. By the time of twelve-tone serialism’s compositional advent, barely a century ago, musicology had become an accepted, institutionalised scholarly discipline, and a cluster of concepts, both technical and historical, had emerged to provide a possible framework for collective viewpoints about how musical works and their materials might be defined and categorised. By 1920, terms like ‘sonata’ and ‘rondo’, ‘consonant’ and ‘dissonant’, ‘tonality’ and ‘atonality’, ‘classical’ and ‘modern(ist)’ were all available to be argued over, and between about 1920 and the end of the ‘long’ twentieth century – 2005, in my reckoning – a vast number of writers on music were bold or incautious enough to include the very recent past in their historical surveys, or even to focus their interpretative work entirely on the most recent years. The year 2005 saw the publication of Richard Taruskin’s monumental oneman, six-volume history of Western art music, and serialism takes its not especially prominent place there in the panoply of descriptive terms against which the author’s critical responses to centuries of musical activity are projected. Unlike those critics and historians between 1920 and 1960 who attempted to get the measure of twelve-tone technique in its early years, Taruskin could take a longer view, and that required placing aesthetic and technical constructs like modernism and serialism in the political and cultural contexts contemporary with them. For example, writing of Webern, Taruskin characterises his twelve-tone works as ‘dehumanized’ and ‘impersonal’, exuding ‘the atmosphere of a solitary alpine peak’, and declaring that it is not hard to connect Webern’s artistic vision, in the context of the turbulent 1930s, with the Utopian or Arcadian (futuristic or nostalgic) cravings that dominated European social and political thought. . . . Webern’s musical Utopias, the most orderly and disciplined worlds of music ever to have been conceived or realized by that time, seem in their tidy beauty of conception and their ruthlessly exacting realization to broach a theme that was on the mind of every artist then alive ominous to some, inspiring to others of art and totalitarianism. (Taruskin 2005a: 741)
With Webern, whose sympathy with right-wing political ideas paralleled his conservative Roman Catholic religious beliefs, it is perfectly legitimate to indicate how it might be possible to react to a perceived conjunction between life and (twelve-tone) work in the way Taruskin does. But with Schoenberg, who switched from his inherited Judaism to Christianity and back again during a lifetime in which he was forced to leave Europe for America, and for whom the conjunction of religion and politics was
Serialism in History and Criticism
inevitably more fraught that was the case with the unpersecuted Webern, it is more difficult to presume the validity of claims about serialism’s fetishising of strict, even repressive ‘laws’. Might not Schoenberg’s intransigent notions about politics and society after the founding of Israel and his response to invitations to move to that country in the late 1940s reflect the bruising experiences of himself and his family as victims of fascist antisemitism? Early twenty-first-century musicology has not always been willing to allow for this possibility; for instance, Klára Móricz – with clear echoes of Taruskin’s claims about connections between serialism and totalitarianism – has been explicit in arguing that Schoenberg’s apparent enthusiasm, late in life, for the newly founded state of Israel cannot be separated from the long-standing authoritarian tendencies of his personal political agenda: ‘Schoenberg’s stubborn, self-righteous political rhetoric overshadows his quasi-religious images and thus creates an unpleasant association between his psalms [that is, his final vocal compositions] and the ruthless political utopias of the twentieth century. . . . Schoenberg had a strong dislike for “democracy”’, and, as ‘a true utopian . . . considered any hint of disunity unacceptable’ (Móricz 2008: 208 and 212). As I have argued elsewhere, Móricz’s line of reasoning risks undervaluing the modernist ambiguities and centrifugal tendencies in Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositions, or even of erasing their significance in pursuit of political and religious point-scoring (Whittall 2016). Nevertheless, the occurrence in recent years of such far-reaching critiques of Schoenberg and the serial principle, long after the technique itself had ceased to be used either with the relative strictness and comprehensiveness of its first phase or with the short-lived intensification of serial mechanics that immediately followed it, underlines the ambivalence and scepticism that have affected assessment of serial initiatives from the beginning. The suspicion that the true serialist is an unrealistic Utopian, obsessed with unity at all costs, and attaching more significance to what can be read on the page (in notes as well as words) than to what can be heard, has often been aired, but it always needs to be approached with proper critical caution.
Teaching the Tone Row The first century of serial composition, and of critical-historical writing about serial music, has also been a time of burgeoning composition pedagogy. Schoenberg believed that students should focus on techniques deducible from the classic compositions of tonal tradition; there was no question
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of him providing instruction in the twelve-tone method, even though in the 1920s he claimed to believe that the method would guarantee the supremacy of German music for the next century. (He might have done better with the vaguer suggestion that music to which serial principles makes fundamental contributions would dominate the next century.) But guides to twelve-tone compositional technique, often alongside analytical demonstrations of serial practice in short examples from Schoenberg and others, were not long in coming, and by the 1940s composer-teachers like Ernst Krenek, René Leibowitz, and Herbert Eimert were producing self-help introductions and manuals which achieved wide circulation (Krenek 1943; Leibowitz 1947; Eimert 1950). A little later, in 1966, Reginald Smith Brindle’s Serial Composition was aimed no less directly at students. This copiously illustrated textbook came complete with exercises, and serialism’s forty-year history was represented, in a text dedicated ‘to my friend Luigi Dallapiccola’, by examples ranging from the first generation of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern to the post-war triumvirate of Boulez, Stockhausen, and Nono (Smith Brindle 1966). Smith Brindle’s references to real music, as well as to specially constructed examples of his own, acknowledged the increasing trend, by the mid-1960s, for critical discussions of serialism to concentrate on the historical process by way of analysis of extracts selected for specific scholarly purposes. In this respect, the American composer and academic George Perle’s Serial Composition and Atonality was particularly significant (Perle 1963), with its emphasis on serialism’s emergence from what Perle termed ‘“free” atonality’, the scare quotes around ‘free’ signalling that, in all instances of ‘post-tonal music’, ‘freedom’ was best conceived in terms of relations between collections of pitch classes grouped not so much according to their places within the many millions of different twelvetone series forms, but within the 200 or so pitch-class sets obeying a strict and uniform ordering principle analogous, as Milton Babbitt was one of the first composer-theorists to point out, to the mathematical concept of set theory. With the publication in 1973 of the first book-length introduction to pitch-class set theory (Forte 1973), the play between set and series, in music that might have little or nothing to do with ‘orthodox’ twelve-tone technique, introduced the more varied approaches to both compositional process and theoretical enquiry around and beyond serialism characteristic of the years since 1980. It is particularly appropriate, therefore, that around 1973 and 1974, the centenary of Schoenberg’s birth provided a platform for musings about the status of serialism in its assumed context of atonality and modernist formal discontinuities – serialism as something uneasily
Serialism in History and Criticism
poised between respect for transformed tradition and principled rejection of outdated and oppressive hierarchies.
A Critical Centenary In October and November 1973, the London Sinfonietta presented a series of twenty-six concerts, twelve in London, containing ‘the complete chamber music of Arnold Schoenberg and Roberto Gerhard’. Gerhard, a Schoenberg pupil and twelve-tone composer long resident in England, had died in 1970, and the sense of a double commemoration was reflected in the substantial programme book that accompanied the series. Among the essays included was Hans Keller’s ‘Schoenberg and the Crisis of Communication’, which among other things acted as a reminder that it was still possible, around that time, to believe that atonality and serialism might and perhaps should consign the extended tonality of Britten and Shostakovich (both very near the end of their careers in 1973) further to the margins. Maybe there are elements of such thinking in Keller’s portrayal of Schoenberg as ‘musical history’s most tragic figure – its most uncompromising clarifier and its leading confuser at the same time’. Keller wrote that ‘it must have been shortly after the fourth string quartet [of 1936] that the shock of atonality was at last totally assimilated, that twelve-note technique had become as instinctive to Schoenberg as tonal language had been’ (Keller 1973). But what Keller does not say here is that the now ‘instinctive’ twelve-note music had not become incontrovertibly atonal: the fourth quartet has become a favoured example for music theorists attempting to demonstrate how that notoriously elusive Schoenbergian concept of ‘suspended tonality’ might have been manifesting itself in his twelve-tone works (cf. Whittall 2008: 110–11). Even Jack Boss, whose recent pair of books about Schoenberg fight a resourceful rearguard action in support of ‘atonal’ as a viable technical concept, has written of the first movement of the fourth quartet that ‘D minor and B flat major serve as tonal-reference surrogates for the two principal motives of the piece’ (Boss 2014: 328). This circumstance lends even more force to Keller’s claim that ‘the ensuing, continued history of tonality’ – between 1936 and 1973, that is – ‘proved that Schoenberg had come too soon’, thereby contributing decisively to ‘the current crisis of communication’ which, Keller says, ‘is not merely, not even chiefly, produced by one musical language having split into several. The one language has also, over a considerable part of the contemporary scene,
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evaporated into none’ (Keller 1973: 48). In clarifying Schoenberg’s persistent duality so cogently, Keller identified the cultural quality of a modernity, centred on serialism, that appeared to have better chances of productive survival if old and new were encouraged to converge, or at least coexist. This meant that Schoenberg and especially Berg provided more promising signals for the future of composition than Webern and the various followers of Webern who constituted the atonal-serial avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s. Schoenberg and Berg could still provide technical stimulus to much later composers even if serialism and atonality as originally understood, have tended to merge with various alternatives – minimalism, spectralism, and working with interval cycles among them. In the musical world of the 2020s, where late modernism and post-modernism enact an uneasy but productive coexistence, there is still a sense of serial or set-based thinking as a useful component of compositional initiatives whose multivalence by no means ensures a sense of diluted progressiveness in its most prominent exemplars (cf. Whittall 2019). The American George Rochberg, a near-contemporary of Hans Keller, is a particularly striking example of a composer who seemed to fall foul of what Keller diagnosed as Schoenberg’s premature attempt to rethink the foundations of musical expression. Rochberg certainly cannot be accused of not taking serialism seriously. He emerged – traumatised, according to one recent narrative, from combat in the Second World War – in search of stylistic security and stability, and his diaries and other writings vividly trace the twists and turns of the consequent quest. Directly linking his life experiences with his compositional methods, Rochberg declared that one of the most prominent impulses toward twelve tone serialism . . . was my reaction to my war experience. The darkness of that whole experience really has rooted itself. . . . I need to find a language with which I could say what I experienced, but obviously refracted, not brutalized by the nature of the experience itself. I had to make damn sure that what I composed . . . would be as beautiful as I could make it. (Quoted in Wlodarski 2019: 51)
In 1952, the year after Schoenberg’s death, Rochberg, at the age of thirtyfour, responded ecstatically to a first hearing of the String Trio – ‘one wonders if this were written by a man or by an angel. Such a work reminds us that music is still a human art’ – and lauded the ‘new visions’ that would surely come from recognising that ‘it is past the time for tonality’ (Wlodarski 2019: 50). Rochberg’s contacts with Dallapiccola, composer of Il prigioniero (1944– 48), around this time clearly reinforced his convictions about the compassionate humanistic essence of using twelve-tone methods to control and
Serialism in History and Criticism
direct a highly expressionistic emotional intensity, cogently confronting trauma rather than simply succumbing to its destructive force. But by the early 1960s, Rochberg was reacting negatively to what he now termed the ‘“overwrought, expressionistic emotional palette” of Schoenberg’s fourth quartet (1936). . . . “The music sounded ugly and unbeautiful to my ears”’ (Wlodarski 2019: 50), and Rochberg would soon find a very different kind of expressiveness in the imitative evocations of Beethoven and Mahler that pervaded his later compositions. Few today would rank Rochberg among the leading figures of later twentieth-century composition, but his turn against expressionism, and his need to musically embody consolation rather than melancholia, were fundamental within the aesthetic and expressive divergences that came to dominate the decades after 1960. Rochberg had no time for what he considered the arrant academicism of post-tonal theorists like George Perle. But it would be simplistic as well as insensitive to characterise Rochberg’s flight into the consolatory as escapist. Many other composers whose early experiences matched Rochberg’s to some extent were also likely to aspire to something transcendent, even if they continued to question it rather than embrace it wholeheartedly, thereby allowing some kind of residual sadness and insecurity to survive within their music’s material manifestation.
Judgements in Perspective In my Introduction to Serialism, written mainly between 2006 and 2008, I was clearly not disposed to concede that the serial principle has gone the way that diatonic tonality appeared to have gone between 1920 and 1960, becoming marginalised, a refuge only for unimaginative conservatives refusing to move with the times. Transformation rather than entropy was not merely serialism’s strategy for survival. Rather, its self-renewing characteristics were the positive, practical consequence of the implicit and explicit critiques that had attended its invention and early evolution. As a result, post-tonal serialism, like tonality, takes its place as a compositional principle eternally available for access and adaptation as composers see fit. Serialism owes its own particular strengths to the critique of tonality and diatonic harmony that brought it into being, and which it has so far completely failed to erase from contemporary super-pluralistic musical consciousness. This paradox is the essence of serialism’s power, and serialism was at its most potent between 1920 and 1970.
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Composers
4
Arnold Schoenberg and the ‘Musical Idea’ jack boss
As one of the inventors of the twelve-tone technique and the first wellknown composer of twelve-tone music, it makes eminent sense that Arnold Schoenberg would be understood by scholars and musicians as a traditionalist, in both the positive and negative senses. Much fruitful work has been done that shows ways in which Schoenberg carried over elements of classical and Romantic form and harmony into his twelve-tone compositions. To mention a few examples, one thinks of Richard Kurth’s illustrations of analogies to classical phrase types and tonic-dominant harmonic progressions in the opening of the Menuett from the Suite op. 25, or Ethan Haimo’s demonstration of how Schoenberg preserves the typical modulation schemes of sonata form using regions of twelve-tone rows in the opening movement of the Fourth Quartet op. 37 (Kurth 1996: 105; Haimo 2002: 225–6). On the other hand, it was Schoenberg’s obstinate tendency to hold on to classical and Romantic conventions of rhythm, form, and texture that caused Pierre Boulez the irritation he so vehemently expressed in ‘Schoenberg Is Dead’ (Boulez 1952). But there is one way in which Schoenberg’s music preserved musical tradition that previous commentators and critics have hardly mentioned, perhaps the one with the most significance for long-range coherence in his twelve-tone music: what he called ‘musical idea’. What exactly is a musical idea? Schoenberg’s explications of it in his writings were less than systematic, and, unfortunately, he never illustrated the concept with one of his own pieces, tonal, atonal, or twelve-tone, so there is room for disagreement on how to understand the term. The closest thing he provided to a textbook definition is found in the essay ‘New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea’ (Schoenberg 1975c): In its most common meaning, the term idea is used as a synonym for theme, melody, phrase or motive. I myself consider the totality of a piece as the idea: the idea which its creator wanted to present. But because of the lack of better terms I am forced to define the term idea in the following manner: Every tone which is added to a beginning tone makes the meaning of that tone doubtful. If for instance, G follows after C, the ear may not be sure whether this expresses C major or G major, or even F major or E minor, and the addition of other tones may or may
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not clarify this problem. In this manner there is produced a state of unrest, of imbalance which grows throughout most of the piece, and is enforced further by similar functions of the rhythm. The method by which balance is restored seems to me the real idea of the composition.
Note that here a musical idea is defined as a tonal piece: the initial problem which causes imbalance that grows through the course of the piece, and is eventually resolved at or near the end, is defined as an uncertainty regarding the tonal context of pitch classes C and G. And, not surprisingly, the literature that attempts to illustrate ‘musical idea’ through analysis, primarily by Schoenberg’s student Patricia Carpenter and her own students, deals almost exclusively with tonal music: Carpenter’s article ‘Grundgestalt as Tonal Function’, an insightful study of tonal problems, elaborations, and solutions in the first movement of Beethoven’s op. 57 piano sonata, is the first and one of the best examples of analytic work in this vein (Carpenter 1983). Since the notions of ‘tonal context’ or ‘tonal problem’ are not possible in twelve-tone music, however, it is more difficult to grasp how a musical idea might serve as the framework for a twelve-tone piece. Since, in the twelvetone style, no note should be considered any more central than any other, how can one perceive a note as foreign or distant from the centre? In my Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music, I explored a number of ways in which pitch classes, intervals, and set classes can participate in narratives that involve creating an ideal state, setting another state in opposition to it, allowing that opposition to elaborate itself and branch out in various ways through the piece, and finally resolving it. Some of my analyses highlighted problems and elaborations that stem from the differences between a symmetrical pitch-class or interval pattern (presented or implied at the beginning) and various close or distant approximations of it. The symmetrical pattern is then reasserted at or near the end, and the approximations are connected to it in significant ways, as a solution. In other cases, the initial opposition and elaboration involve different partitions of different rows that create what seem like irreconcilable pitch-class or set-class elements. The solution will then consist of demonstrating how the conflicting partitions and their clashing consequences can be traced back to the original source row. Finally, a number of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone pieces, particularly later ones, include a struggle between various source row forms for primacy, which is resolved in favour of one of the potential sources at piece’s end. The bulk of this chapter will be devoted to illustrating how musical idea is manifested in two of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone piano pieces: the Prelude
Arnold Schoenberg and the ‘Musical Idea’
from the Suite for Piano op. 25, written right at the beginning of his twelvetone period in 1921–3, and the Piano Piece op. 33a, written in 1928–9 after Schoenberg had gained some facility at working with row pairs related by combinatoriality; ‘hexachordal inversional combinatoriality’ refers to a property between inversionally related row forms in which the corresponding hexachords have no notes in common and may be combined vertically into other orderings of the twelve-note universe. Both the Prelude and the Piano Piece express their musical idea by elaborating and resolving an opposition between a symmetrical ideal and close or distant approximations of it: the symmetrical pattern consists of pitch classes in the Prelude, and of pitch intervals in op. 33a. Given the limits of this chapter, I will not be able to give these pieces thorough section-by-section analyses, as I do in chapters 2 and 5 of Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music, but instead will highlight how their problems are posed, elaborated, and resolved with a few snapshots.
Suite for Piano Op. 25, Prelude The Prelude was the first piece by Schoenberg to be written in the twelvetone style throughout, and a number of scholars have claimed that it does not use the row according to the conventional notion, as a single, consistent linear ordering of all twelve pitch classes. Ethan Haimo argues for what he calls a ‘tetrachordal polyphonic complex’, a division of the row into its three discrete tetrachords, which are then ordered freely between themselves (but usually preserve ordering within themselves) and often appear simultaneously (Haimo 1990: 85–6). In what follows, I will sometimes count twelve-tone rows using ‘order positions’ (meaning first, second, third, etc., notes in the row), starting with 0 and ending with 11, and will highlight them in bold, so that tetrachords ordered within themselves but not between themselves might read: 4–5–6–7, 0–1–2–3, 8–9–10–11; or 8–9–10–11, 0–1–2–3, 4–5–6–7; or other such combinations. However, when these same twelve numbers (0–11) are not in bold, they represent the different pitches of the chromatic scale, regardless of octave. Therefore, C is represented as 0, C♯/D ♭ as 1, D as 2, and so on. Hence, a C major triad could be represented as [047]. Part of Schoenberg’s set table for the piece, in the transcription provided by Reinhold Brinkmann for the collected edition of Schoenberg’s works, is reproduced in Figure 4.1, to which I have added a pitch-class map
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Figure 4.1 Part of Schoenberg’s set tables for the Suite, op. 25, with a pitch class map
(Schoenberg 1975d: 77), while the autograph version of the table appears earlier in this volume as Figure 1.2. Haimo also reproduces this same set table, to provide evidence that Schoenberg had not yet conceived of the source row of the Prelude as a linearly ordered twelve-tone row – but I am interested in it for a completely different reason. Namely, it sets the discrete tetrachords of P4 (the prime form beginning on pitch class 4) and R4 (the retrograde of that same form) against one another, tetrachord by tetrachord, so that each line of the configuration creates a palindrome, and the whole also creates a symmetrical pitch-class structure. This structure then becomes the ‘ideal state’ in the piece, which is only approximated at the beginning (creating a problem), approached more closely but then completely abandoned for a different symmetrical structure in the middle (the elaboration of the problem), and finally realised in its perfect form near the end as a solution. Figure 4.2 illustrates the opening of the piece, in which the ideal symmetrical shape is hinted at but not realised. The pitch-class map at the top of the example shows that when P4 and P10 are divided into discrete tetrachords and the corresponding tetrachords placed against one another, instead of the full collection of six contiguous dyad palindromes that P4 and R4 had created, only two are realised contiguously ( – and – ), while two
Arnold Schoenberg and the ‘Musical Idea’
P4
P10
4 5
7 1
10 11
1 7
6 3
8 2
0
9
2 8
5
6 3
11
0 9
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Figure 4.2 Schoenberg, Prelude op. 25, bb. 1 3
are realised by a contiguous dyad and a non-contiguous one: – and – . In this way, the combination of P4 and P10 can only hint at the perfect symmetry that P4 and R4 would have created. Looking now at how these four palindromic dyads are projected in the score itself, it seems that Schoenberg has in fact attempted to highlight the available symmetries in a variety of ways: – through proximity and similar contours and articulations (accents), – through similar contours and articulations, – by means of similar dynamics and articulations, and finally – with similar articulations. These dyads account for much of the ‘balance’ that Kurth celebrates in this opening phrase’s ‘mosaic polyphony’ (Kurth 1992: 190–6). But they still fall short of a completely symmetrical state, and that creates a problem – with its associated opportunities for elaboration and solution. As the Prelude continues, it breaks up into subsections of the overall binary form’s A section (bb. 1–16a) that contain pairs and sometimes trios of row forms, in bb. 3b–5a, 5b–7a, 7b–9a, 9b–11a, and 11b–13a. These early sections fluctuate between pairings that yield fewer palindromic dyads and
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those that yield more, and also vary the number of potential two-note palindromes that are emphasised as audible motives within the texture. With b. 13, however, comes a passage that approximates the ideal more closely than anything heard before – but falls just short. It is shown in Figure 4.3. The lower right-hand corner of the example shows that I4 (the inversion of the prime form that starts on pitch class 4, around that pitch class) and RI4 (the retrograde of I4), the row pair featured in this passage, have the potential for six palindromic dyads because they are retrogrades of one another. But only three of these dyads are highlighted in the music itself (shaded in the example): – , – , and – , the last of which is realised by using an overlap to create a three-note horizontal mirror in the middle of the left-hand part. As the registrally sensitive pitch-class map in the lower left-hand corner and the marked score at the top of the example show, the other three potential dyad palindromes are all obscured in some way. and are given as verticals in the right hand of b. 13a and answered in the left hand of b. 13b by horizontal renditions of and that have parts of other dyads interleaved between them. And the second dyad in – is reversed within the tremolo figure
Figure 4.3 Schoenberg, Prelude op. 25, b. 13
Arnold Schoenberg and the ‘Musical Idea’
(marked in the score, together with the three highlighted palindromes). This is not a solution quite yet, though it comes close. Before finding its eventual solution, however, the Prelude wanders off into one more subsection that elaborates the problem more radically than anything heard before, the climactic passage near the beginning of the large A′ section at bb. 17b–19. It is portrayed, with its rather complex pitch-class map, in Figure 4.4a. As the pitch-class map shows (once it is untangled), there are a number of contiguous and non-contiguous dyad invariances between P4, I10, P10, and I4 that enable Schoenberg to assign various pitch pairs to more than one tetrachord, and, in addition, within both row pairs the second and third tetrachords routinely begin before the first and second finish, creating multiple overlaps. All four rows contain pitch classes 1 and 7 in order positions 2 and 3, and the first tetrachords of P4 and I10 link to one another on the downbeat of b. 18 through this invariance, as do the first tetrachords of P10 and I4 on the downbeat of b. 19. The non-contiguous dyad invariances begin with pitch classes 3 and 11, which appear in order position 5 of P4 and I10, and then swap places in order position 8 of the same rows. Schoenberg uses this to create a link (expressed as repeating notes Cb5 and Eb5 in the left hand of b. 18a) between the second and third tetrachords of P4 and I10. Other tetrachords that are linked in similar ways are the third tetrachords of P4 and I10 with the first tetrachords of P10 and I4, through {4, 10} (left hand of b. 18b), the second tetrachords of P4 and I10 with the second tetrachords of P10 and I4, through {0, 2} (right hand of bb. 18b–19a), and the second and third tetrachords of P10 and I4, through {5, 9} (left hand of b. 19a). The ensuing tangle of tetrachords and pitch classes with dual meanings, so much more complicated than the simple palindromic ideal of Figure 4.1, nevertheless creates its own symmetrical shape. It is highlighted within Figure 4.4a’s pitch-class map by the white circles inside the two shaded boxes: the verticals {3, 11}, {0, 2}, {6, 8}, and {5, 9} in b. 18, balanced by {5, 9}, {6, 8}, {0, 2}, and {3, 11} in b. 19. Kurth calls this the ‘gamma palindrome’ and highlights it as the most important and perceptible of three pitch palindromes in the passage, which do not synchronise with each other and together ‘motivate [a] drive toward some greater stability’ (the loud dynamics and registral extremes also mark this passage as unsettled) (Kurth 1992: 200–6). But in the larger context of the subsections that have preceded it, we can also understand Kurth’s ‘gamma’ as the ultimate elaboration of the work’s problem, which follows all the approaches to and departures from complete horizontal symmetry of all twelve contiguous dyads in bb. 1–17 with a completely different
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a)
b)
Figures 4.4a and b Schoenberg, Prelude op. 25, bb. 17b 21
Arnold Schoenberg and the ‘Musical Idea’
approach to dyad symmetry involving non-contiguous verticals. It is almost as if the piece is saying: ‘I’ve tried to attain this piece’s ideal pitchclass palindrome for seventeen bars and failed. I’m going to try a completely different kind of palindrome.’ This ultimate elaboration of the problem, this high point of instability, is followed immediately by a passage that Kurth claims to bring ‘desired stability’ (Kurth 1992: 205), and that I understand as the solution to the work’s problem: bb. 20–21, portrayed in Figure 4.4b. In each of these measures, since retrograde-related rows are again pushed up against one another, tetrachord by tetrachord, P4/R4 and I10/RI10, there is the potential for six dyad palindromes – the ideal shape. In b. 20, this potential is not fully realised, because and do not reverse themselves. But the other four dyads in the configuration not only reverse their pitch classes, but also their pitches, so that the music takes a large step closer to perfect symmetry. In b. 21, it gets all the way to perfect pitch-class symmetry, as the middle dyad pairs overlap in a single note, , , and . The one detail preventing complete pitch symmetry is Schoenberg’s transposition of A and B♭ in the left hand at the end of the measure down one octave. The passage’s function as a solution following bb. 17–19’s ultimate elaboration is made clearer, I think, by Schoenberg’s drastic reduction in dynamics from ff to pp and narrowing of the register.
Piano Piece Op. 33a I have shown how, at the very beginning of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone period, he created a narrative spanning the op. 25 Prelude which manifests the ‘musical idea’, by suggesting a symmetrical pitch-class pattern, obscuring it further, and bringing it back into closer focus, then presenting an alternative symmetry that is nothing like the first in a climax, and, finally, realising the symmetry that was originally only suggested in a denouement. Five years later, after discovering and developing the hexachordal-combinatorial relationship between rows, he would return to the same sort of idea presentation in the op. 33a Piano Piece, expressing an old narrative in a new way. Op. 33a’s initial problem has to do with an incompatibility it presents between intervallic symmetry and row order, as shown in Figure 4.5a. As the example shows, the two principal (and combinatorial) rows of the piece, P10 and I3, are first presented out of order as a series of six discrete tetrachord sonorities (with the second row’s tetrachords in retrograde) in bb. 1–2, then both of them in linear order, but reversed with RI3 above R10,
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a)
b)
Figures 4.5a and b Schoenberg, Piano Piece op. 33a, bb. 1 9
Arnold Schoenberg and the ‘Musical Idea’
in bb. 3–5. The extensive reordering of notes in bb. 1–2 enables a pattern between the unordered pitch intervals of the six chords that is both horizontally and vertically symmetrical. (Schoenberg associated simultaneous horizontal and vertical symmetry with perfection in a number of his other pieces, and it even portrayed God’s perfection in Moses und Aron (cf. Boss 2014: 332–41).) Counting intervals up from the bottom produces , , , followed by a sequence of chords that reverses the previous elements and simultaneously flips them upside down: , , . I call this the ‘palindromic ideal’ in Figure 4.5a. Once row order regains control in bb. 3–5, however, the pitch-interval symmetry of the opening measures disappears and is replaced by a less immediately audible symmetry, that caused by set classes: 4–23 (0257), 4–1 (0123), 4–10 (0235), 4–10, 4–1, 4–23. I call this the more abstract ‘echo’ of the ‘palindromic ideal’. The problem that op. 33a poses in its opening measures has to do with the seeming incompatibility of vertical and horizontal symmetry on the one hand and row order on the other: can both coexist? Or must row order necessarily weaken perfect intervallic symmetry? Before answers to these questions are produced near the end of the piece, the first step in the realisation of the musical idea in op. 33a is progressively to obscure both the palindromic idea and the echo, similar to the way the Prelude op. 25 blurred its palindromic pitch-class pattern in its opening measures. Figure 4.5b shows how bb. 6–9 obfuscate the symmetries of the previous example through rhythmic displacement, as well as moving certain notes up or down by octave. (In the larger sonata form that spans op. 33a, bb. 6–9 constitute the first variation of bb. 1–5’s first theme.) In b. 6’s variation of the first chord of the palindromic ideal, C3, F3, and B♭3 rise an octave and B2 is delayed an eighth note, forming unordered pitch-interval stack followed by −13 (rather than ). The second chord delays its top three notes by an eighth, changing to . And the rhythmic displacements and octave transfers carry on through the remaining four chords, changing what had been six horizontally and vertically symmetrical tetrachords into six conglomerations of chords and melodic intervals, all of which are unique and some of which are not even tetrachords (at the end of b. 7). Bars 8–9 perform the same kind of obfuscation through rhythmic displacement of the set-class symmetrical ‘echo’ of bb. 3–5. To produce something like the original passage’s palindrome (4–23, 4–1, 4–10, 4–10, 4–1, 4–23), I had to group notes from different parts of the measure and from overlapping parts of the texture, creating a pitch-class segmentation
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that calls to mind the gerrymander – that is, manipulating the boundary line of a legislative district to favour a particular party – from partisan politics. Even with the gerrymanders, though, the sequence of set classes does not form a pure horizontal mirror: the initial pair (4–23 and 4–1) repeats. Through rhythmic and registral changes, but also through repeating parts of the row out of order, Schoenberg begins to obscure the perfect and imperfect symmetries of his opening. After a second variation of the P theme in bb. 10–13 that continues the process of obfuscation, the subsidiary theme enters in bb. 14–18, shown in Figure 4.6a. This passage and the one that immediately follows (Figure 4.6b) play an elaborating role within op. 33a’s ‘musical idea’ that is closely analogous to the part bb. 17–19 (Figure 4.4a) played in the Prelude – after the initial symmetry is progressively obscured, the S theme casts it aside and tries to attain symmetrical perfection in a completely different way (but still using the main pair of combinatorial rows, P10 and I3). Namely, the subsidiary theme abandons the intervallic and set-class symmetry of the opening measures in favour of horizontal pitch symmetry, particularly in the right hand of the piano. Bars 14 and 15 present the first hexachord of P10 as the complete palindrome (some pairs of notes are grouped vertically) followed by an incomplete version of the same. Bars 16–18 then supply the second hexachord of P10, split into two pitch palindromes: and . The left hand accompanies with the corresponding hexachords of I3 mostly in linear arrangements, forming aggregates between the hands in bb. 14–16a and 16b–18. This attempt to create horizontal pitch symmetry does a certain amount of violence to the ordered presentation of P10 in bb. 14–18. In the following closing section, shown in Figure 4.6b, the same incentive results in even more confusion with respect to the linearity of the row form. Not only are parts of rows taken forward and backward, but also notes of the complete linear presentations of R10, RI3, and the second hexachords of P10 and I3 are missing. Bars 19–20 set R10 in the right hand against RI3 in the left, using rhythms and textures reminiscent of first theme material (this abbreviation of thematic material is my main justification for calling this section ‘closing’). R10 progresses as far as order position 9, pitch class 0, and then that pitch class with its predecessors, , gets caught up in another pitch palindrome, , which repeats. Meanwhile, RI3 also only progresses as far as its order position 9, pitch class 1, which likewise takes part in a smaller pitch palindrome, . In both cases, it is
Arnold Schoenberg and the ‘Musical Idea’
a)
b)
Figures 4.6a and b Schoenberg, Piano Piece op. 33a, bb. 14 22
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the emergence of the pitch palindromes that causes the row to be incomplete. Likewise, the second hexachord of I3 that counterpoints with the second hexachord of P10 in bb. 20–23a, using the rhythms and textures of the S theme, stops one note short, not reaching all the way to pitch class 9, because it gets entangled in a small palindrome, . The C theme elaborates the problem within the Piano Piece’s musical idea by showing, repeatedly and forcefully, that the alternative way of making palindromes proposed by the S theme is not an acceptable substitute, because it destroys the integrity of the ordered row. The violence it does in the pitchclass realm is made much more tangible by the forte dynamic marking and ‘martellato’ of bb. 19–20. So now that it has become clear that pitch palindromes cannot reconcile the piece’s initial conflict between symmetry and row order, but in fact have the completely opposite effect, it remains for Schoenberg to show how those two properties can coexist within the same texture. After a fairly long development section (bb. 25–32a) where he gradually rebuilds the palindromic ideal of bb. 1–2, interval by interval, bb. 32b–34 presents the recapitulation of the P theme – portrayed in Figure 4.7. Instructors of undergraduate core theory who use op. 33a as an introduction to twelvetone music will certainly recognise the right hand in bb. 32–33a as that place to which they send their students to find the source row of the piece in its pure, unadulterated form, presented without order changes, missing notes, or verticals to confuse the analytic process. RI3 follows it in bb. 33b– 34, but with several verticals and a short palindrome involving the third discrete tetrachord in b. 34b. The left hand in this section accompanies with the combinatorial forms I3, followed by R10 – in order between the tetrachords, but with the order within the tetrachords compromised by verticals. Still, these measures present one of their row forms in proper order, and the other three in something relatively close to proper order. It is remarkable, then, that at the same time they are able to preserve some (but not all) of the palindromic ideal, the horizontally and vertically symmetrical pattern, of bb. 1–2. At the bottom of Figure 4.7, the discrete tetrachords of P10 and RI3 in the right hand as well as I3 and R10 in the left are stacked vertically so as to preserve the register of each note, and unordered pitch intervals between the pitches are listed. The intervals of P10 and RI3 (from the bottom up) are: , , , , , and – different intervals from bb. 1–2, but preserving some of the same symmetries. Most salient is the inverted relationship between verticals 1 and 6, which replicates the outside chords of the palindromic ideal in a different form. But verticals 2 and 5 also share pitch
Arnold Schoenberg and the ‘Musical Idea’
Figure 4.7 Schoenberg, Piano Piece op. 33a, bb. 32b 34
intervals 5 and 6 in corresponding locations (not inverted), preserving some of their horizontal symmetry; as do verticals 3 and 5, which preserve interval 6 in the middle position and octave-complement the intervals on the outside: 4 and 5 become 8 and 7. Finally, there are also a few vertical symmetries between the hands, marked at the bottom of Figure 4.7 with circles and arrows. This passage constitutes the solution to op. 33a’s problem, the demonstration that vertical and horizontal symmetry and row order can indeed coexist. It is certainly true that it could have done a more thorough job of mirroring its interval stacks in the right hand. The bracketed chords after verticals 4 and 5 at the bottom of Figure 4.7 show what those verticals would have looked like had Schoenberg created an exact horizontal and vertical palindrome like the one in bb. 1–2. It would indeed have been possible for the right hand to play through these bracketed verticals in the order prescribed by RI3, and , forming a perfect union of intervallic symmetry and row order. But that would have made the arch contour in the right hand less clear, obscuring an important
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feature that makes a connection between this passage and the opening measures. Not every twelve-tone piece Schoenberg wrote expresses a complete musical idea – problem, elaborations, and solution – as the two examples I have discussed in this chapter do. Moses und Aron, because of its subject – Moses’s failed attempt to communicate God to his people – organises itself around an incomplete musical idea: an initial problem, representing the conflict between Moses’s words and Aron’s images, which continues to elaborate itself without ever coming to resolution (see Boss 2014, 330–94). Other pieces with texts – for example ‘Tot’ from the Drei Lieder op. 48 – abstract a ‘basic image’ from the text and use that as an organising principle rather than an idea (Stephen Peles explains quite well how the image of a unitary entity with two opposite sides controls the partitions and intervallic and pitch-class patterns of that song) (Peles 2004). But, in general, the ‘musical idea’, adapted for use as an analytic framework, is an invaluable tool for understanding how Schoenberg’s music coheres and exactly how he carried on the tradition of his German and Austrian predecessors.
5
Alban Berg’s Eclectic Serialism silvio dos santos
During his lifetime he was a leading member of the avant garde and would have never felt himself to be anything else. Adorno 1991: 69 We remain incorrigible romantics! Berg to Hermann Watznauer on 16 September 1935 (Berg 1985)
If there is a single, enduring quality in Alban Berg’s serial works (c. 1925–35), it is his ability to use the twelve-tone method of composition as a form of exegesis for his personal, intellectual, and musical heritage in musical narratives suffused with apparent contradictions. From his first twelve-tone composition, the second version of his song ‘Schliesse mir die Augen beide’ (1925), to his last work, the Violin Concerto (1935), Berg grappled with efforts to establish his own identity as a modern composer while dealing with issues related to personal and artistic influences from individuals such as Wagner, Mahler, Wedekind, and Kraus, as well as the overbearing figure of Schoenberg. In contrast to his former teacher, who was openly averse to external influences, Berg embraced an array of individuals as ‘ideal identities’ (Santos 2014), to be played out in his creative process. In doing so, Berg combined what have been generally understood as antithetical ideas in an attempt to elevate his method of composition as an overarching system that brings together his modernistic aesthetics and the art of the past through textures in which twelve-tone serialism and tonality are interwoven. Such an approach to composition was bound to be controversial from the very beginning, as serialism was supposed to be a logical antidote to the excesses of tonality as practised by the late Romantic composers. Because Berg’s approach to serialism embraced gestures of tonality, it also attracted criticism even from members of his own circle. In 1946, Schoenberg wrote
I am grateful for the support and encouragement Martin Iddon offered in the development of this chapter.
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an addendum to his essay ‘Composition with Twelve-Tones’, where he engaged in a blistering judgement of Berg’s approach: I have to admit that Alban Berg, who was perhaps the least orthodox of us three Webern, Berg and I in his operas mixed pieces or parts of pieces of a distinctive tonality with those which were distinctively non tonal. He explained this, apolo getically, by contending that as an opera composer he could not, for reasons of dramatic expression and characterization, renounce the contrast furnished by a change from major to minor. (Schoenberg 1975a: 244 5)
Not accepting Berg’s explanation, Schoenberg continued: ‘Though [Berg] was right as a composer, he was wrong theoretically’ (Schoenberg 1975a: 245). It is difficult to assess Schoenberg’s sincerity when he considered Berg to be ‘right’ as a composer while mixing serialism with tonality, as Schoenberg’s main concern as a composer was to establish relational events based on the initial idea of a composition. A piece that starts with a twelve-tone series would logically develop configurations afforded by the series, and these configurations would not be tonal. His consistent position on this issue is well documented. Schoenberg’s statement puts forward, nevertheless, a conflict between the notion of the composer as composer versus the composer as theorist, and the implication that, because Berg used tonality for ‘dramatic expression’, he was less systematic in his compositional process. Such a view has helped perpetuate the notion that Berg was ‘more Romantic’ than the other members of his circle – a view that has slowly been challenged since the autograph sources preserved at the Austrian National Library were opened to scholars in 1981. Compounding the problem discussed above is the pervasive concept of a ‘Second Viennese School’ with the figurehead of Schoenberg followed by his ostensibly faithful pupils (Auner 1999). As a result, Schoenberg’s shadow remains a long one. As Taruskin puts it, Berg was ‘formerly a pupil – and still very much a disciple – of Schoenberg’ (Taruskin 2005a: 193; my emphasis). Taruskin is not alone in subjugating Berg to Schoenberg. Berg did it himself. While dedicating his opera Lulu to Schoenberg on 28 August 1934, Berg wrote: Please accept it, not only as a product of years of work most devoutly consecrated to you, but also as an outward document: the whole world the German world, too is to recognise in the dedication that this German opera like all my works is indigenous to the realm of that most German music, which will bear your name for all eternity. (Berg and Schoenberg 1987: 452)
Such expression certainly contributed to cementing Schoenberg’s approach to twelve-tone composition as the standard for analyses, a point of departure
Alban Berg’s Eclectic Serialism
and constant reference in the interpretation of Berg’s musical language. George Perle, who established one of the most groundbreaking frameworks for analysing Berg’s music, argues defensively that ‘Berg’s characteristic practice . . . significantly distinguishes his twelve-tone technique from Schoenberg’s and Webern’s’ (Perle 1989: 9). In his book Serialism, Whittall argues that ‘like his fellow Schoenberg pupil Anton Webern, Berg had followed the master into the brave new world of post-tonal and total chromaticism’ (Whittall 2008: 65). While there is no denying Berg’s indebtedness to Schoenberg’s musical and intellectual mentoring in his early years, the extent to which Berg followed Schoenberg in his mature years is certainly debatable, especially after the success of his opera Wozzeck (1914–22). Moreover, Berg’s differences are evident in the ways in which his twelvetone compositions do not fit – and surely were never meant to fit – Schoenberg’s model. Berg was keenly aware of his position and approached his method of composition as a means of establishing ‘something more genuinely Berg’ (Berg 2014). Adorno was one of the first to recognise the unique qualities in Berg’s music and openly expressed his goal of separating him from the other members of the so-called Second Viennese School. In a parenthetical comment on a letter to Berg on 23 November 1925, he put it bluntly: ‘this prattling about the “Schoenberg pupil” must stop’ (Adorno and Berg 2005: 28). Another important feature in Berg’s music is his penchant for inscribing his works with a multiplicity of extra-musical narratives, especially programmatic and autobiographical references (Floros 1994; Perle 2001). From Adorno’s early description of the Lyric Suite as a ‘latent opera’ to the numerous essays written about Berg’s so-called ‘secret programmes’ (Jarman 1997; Perle 2001), it is clear that these features are ingrained in his approach to the compositional process. By now, it is impossible to dissociate Berg’s compositional choices from the extra-musical significations. Together, these features encode Berg’s music with apparent antinomies that prove to be challenging to any method of analysis. Hailey puts it best: Contradiction and paradox are central ingredients to Berg’s persona and of his music. He was a man of open amicability and of many secrets; a faithful friend and an eager consumer of malicious gossip; a composer of fierce modernism who courted popular appeal. The elusive qualities of his character make it easy to be sucked into a vortex of eternal regress and self absorption. Berg, the man, we follow at our own peril. Berg the composer, however, transformed the spinning vortex of his unknowable self into extraordinary music that reaches beyond the self toward a common understanding of the human condition. (Hailey 2010: 28)
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While contradiction and paradox may seem problematic, they are the modus operandi in Berg’s compositional process and must be considered as such. Perhaps these are the features that resonated most with Adorno and may explain in part his championing and defence of Berg’s music throughout his life. For Adorno, as Morgan Rich has demonstrated, Berg’s approach to twelve-tone serialism corresponds to his working out the concept of negative dialectics – a concept usually associated with Adorno’s late thought – and the ways in which his reflections on twelvetone music were integral to his philosophical work. In Adorno’s view, Rich observes, ‘the strict twelve-tone style stopped the dialectical process in music. Schoenberg’s “laws” stopped the work from making a way forward’ (Rich 2016: 81). As Adorno expressed it to Berg, ‘there is only a “negative” dodecaphony, being the utmost rational borderline case of dissolution of tonality (even when tonal elements appear within dodecaphony; for then they, as a construction, are coincidental in their tonality, being simply dictated by the row!)’ (Adorno and Berg 2005: 71–2). Ultimately, the apparent contradictions in Berg’s music correspond to what Adorno terms a ‘category of reflection’ (Adorno 2007: 144). While Geuss has argued that Berg was not interested in Adorno’s philosophical thought (Geuss 1997: 38), the possibility that a two-way exchange existed between them, and that Adorno, like many others, may have influenced Berg as well is worth considering.
Theory and Practice As I have suggested, one of the most pervasive problems in the various analytical studies of Berg’s music relates to the ways in which Berg handles serialism and tonality in his mature works. In one of the most comprehensive analysis of Berg’s music, while favouring cyclic constructions, Headlam adopts a provocative tone: ‘Berg’s later music . . . is not truly twelve-tone – except for the second version of the song ‘Schliesse mir die Augen beide’ – despite the presence of rows and characteristic twelve-tone techniques. It is also not the case that Berg “fused” twelve-tone techniques with tonality’ (Headlam 1996: 195). Referring to the Bach chorale ‘Es ist genug’ in the Violin Concerto, for instance, Headlam argues that ‘its tonal language seamlessly emerges from and dissolves into the surrounding cyclically-based passages’ (Headlam 1996: 199–200). Whittall, arguing that we cannot ignore the highly recognisable tonal passages in Berg’s music, suggests ‘the possibility that [Berg] liked the idea of using such
Alban Berg’s Eclectic Serialism
dramatic oppositions in non-arbitrary but still potentially disorientating ways should not be rejected out of hand’ (Whittall 2008: 74–5). Clearly, as Ashby has argued, ‘serialism has become more important and specific as a historiographical marker for us than it was as a compositional device for anyone in the Schoenberg circle’ (Ashby 2002: 399; emphasis in original). Indeed, it should not be forgotten that, when Berg started exploring serial techniques, there was no ‘theory’ of twelve-tone music, and Berg learned from an eclectic array of sources as were available to him. A set of autograph manuscripts held at the Austrian National Library, for example, demonstrates the lengths to which Berg went in analysing Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano op. 25. Of particular significance is the way in which Berg isolates the second tetrachord of the row [G♭, E♭, A♭, D] and labels it ‘tonika’ (ÖNB Musiksammlung F21 Berg 107/i, fol. 2 v), reordering the other elements so as to form a chromatic ordered set (F21 Berg 107/i, fol. 1). In another page, Berg experiments with cyclic formations, more closely associated with his own practice than with Schoenberg’s (F21 Berg 107/i, fols. 4 and 4 v). While revisiting the origins of Berg’s approach to twelve-tone composition, Ashby has compellingly demonstrated that Berg’s approach to serialism has close affinities with the discoveries of his student Fritz Klein, who, like Josef Matthias Hauer, may stake a claim to have generated a model of dodecaphony independent, at least to begin with, from Schoenberg’s (Ashby 1995). In a letter to Schoenberg on 13 July 1926 (located in Box 29, Folder 11, Arnold Schoenberg Correspondence and Other Papers, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington DC), while explaining his conception and use of the row in the Lyric Suite, which is the same one used in ‘Schliesse mir die Augen beide’, Berg was remarkably upfront about his indebtedness to Klein, particularly his borrowing the allinterval set (Figure 5.1) and the ‘Mutterakkord’, an all-interval twelve-tone chord (Figure 5.2) (see Berg and Schoenberg 1987: 349–51; Berg 2014: 203). For Berg, the axis of symmetry and the potential tonal references within the row were particularly attractive, even if they restricted the number of possible transpositions of the series (Figure 5.3). Of significance is Berg’s
Figure 5.1 Berg’s illustration of the row set in the Lyric Suite, borrowed from F. H. Klein (Berg 2014: 203)
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Figure 5.2 Berg’s illustration of the all notes and all intervals chord
Figure 5.3 Berg’s illustration of axis of rotation generating the C major and G♭ chords and scales
concern with the hexachordal content of the series and its potential for generating cyclic structures and invariant segments, which became defining traits in his musical language. While Berg’s use of Klein’s all-interval set and the all-interval twelvetone chord are the most visible markers of his influence, it was perhaps Klein’s aesthetics that provided the intellectual foundation for Berg’s approach to his later compositions. Consider Klein’s statement about the results of what he called Musikstatistik [statistics of music]: ‘Since in my statistics of music all chords, from the simple triad to the complex Mutterakkord, are equal citizens in a realm of tones (the only fair estimation!), their consequences, namely tonality and extonality, are also to be considered equal manners of expression’ (quoted in Ashby 1995: 72–3). This comment seems to neutralise the notion of a conflict between tonality and atonality, even suggesting a lineage between the ‘simple triad’ and the all-interval twelve-tone chord. While Berg had explored some proto-serial features in his music before 1925 (Perle 1989: 1–6; Headlam 1996: 194– 216), his earliest attempt at the twelve-tone method of composition was his second setting of Theodor Storm’s poem ‘Schliesse mir die Augen beide’. The first setting, composed in C major in 1907, was dedicated to
Alban Berg’s Eclectic Serialism
Helene Nahowsky, his future wife; the second setting was dedicated to Hanna Fuchs, after a liaison that started in 1925 (Floros, Berg, and Fuchs 2008: 54). The two pieces were originally published side by side in the periodical Die Musik in 1930 and included a dedicatory note to Emil Hertzka, in celebration of Universal Edition’s twenty-fifth anniversary, in which Berg describes the works as representing the progression of music in a quarter of a century, from tonality to twelve-tone serialism (Reich 1930). Together, the two versions capture Berg’s teleological perspective on twelve-tone serialism, from interwoven traits of tonality latent in the formation of the series to the use of musical gestures as expressions of his autobiographical impulses. Berg’s motive for publishing the two versions side by side appears to be both an affirmation of Klein’s aesthetics and a justification for his own musical language. Berg’s extraordinary explanation of his method advances some of the theoretical precepts that underlie both Perle’s and Headlam’s approach to analysis of his music but, more importantly, positions him, to borrow Allan Janik’s concept, as a ‘critical modernist’ (Janik 2001: 15–36). Although Janik applies this concept to Schoenberg, it is no less applicable to Berg, as critical modernists found it necessary to become cultural critics in order to defend the principles of logic behind musical composition and appreciation and to confront the art of the past and present as major intellectual figures had done at the time. As Born argues, such a theoretical impulse, at the onset of twelve-tone serialism, was also a defining trait of German modernism (Born 1995: 42). Indeed, as Hall has demonstrated, Berg’s deliberately explanatory attitude towards his compositional process and musical choices is illustrated in his numerous annotations throughout the autograph manuscripts (Hall 1997). When Adorno entitled his book Alban Berg: The Master of the Smallest Link, he had a point (Adorno 1991), for it is now clear that everything in Berg’s music is set with deliberate calculation, even to the smallest detail. In his Sound Figures, Adorno goes further, claiming: ‘That means that there is not a single movement, no section, no theme, no period, no motive, nor even a single note that fails to fulfill its wholly unambiguous and unmistakable formal meaning even in the most complex contexts’ (Adorno 1999a: 75–6).
The Hermeneutical Impulse If Berg’s attention to the smallest details in the composition – and, I would add, an architectonic control over the large-scale formal structures – granted him the title of ‘master of the smallest link’, then the composition
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of the Violin Concerto made him the master of contradictions. The context of the composition is important. Composed at a moment of great distress in the composer’s life, when he found himself in poor health and felt rejected by his own Vienna after the rise of the National Socialist Party – performances of his work had been all but banned in the Germanic world – he felt compelled to stop working on his opera Lulu and accept the commission for the concerto from the American violinist Louis Krasner. The sum of US$1,500.00 would have been a welcome relief for his financial stress. This commission also carried the promise of future performances by the well-known virtuoso as well as the possibility for Berg to validate his own compositional techniques, particularly the juxtaposition of tonality and twelve-tone serialism. As is well known, this work is fraught with extra-musical associations. Chief among them is the dedication to Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius, who died in April 1935. Because of Berg’s insertion of the chorale ‘Es ist genug’ from Bach’s Cantata BWV 60 and the dedication of the concerto to ‘the memory of an angel’, the work has been interpreted as a sort of requiem, as well as a premonition of Berg’s own death, which occurred on 24 December 1935 (Pople 1997: 224). Since the discovery of the so-called ‘secret programmes’ in Berg’s mature works, however, it is also clear that he inscribed the concerto with autobiographical narratives, connecting his present and past experiences. As Douglas Jarman has persuasively demonstrated, the concerto contains a secret programme related to Berg’s affair with Hanna Fuchs, which had started in 1925 and presumably continued up to 1935 (Jarman 1997; Floros, Berg, and Fuchs 2008). And much as he had done in most of his twelvetone works from the Lyric Suite to Lulu, Berg encoded both the formal and serial structures of the concerto with elements recalling and retelling that affair. In addition, as if nostalgically referring to his past experiences, Berg included a quotation from a Carinthian folk song apparently related to his past affair with Marie Scheuchl, a maid at his family estate, with whom he had a child at the beginning of the century (Pople 1991: 34). These features alone reaffirm Berg’s compulsion to include autobiographical inscriptions in his works. More recently, Jarman has also discussed Berg’s potential overture to the National Socialists, by incorporating the motto ‘Frisch, Fromm, Fröhlich, Frei’ (‘Fresh, Devout, Happy, Free’) as descriptors of the different sections in the Violin Concerto; he also inscribed its acrostic formed by the letters ‘FFFF’ in a manuscript for the concerto. As Jarman argues, the presence of a symbol with a close relation to German Nationalism in the sketches is deeply problematic, especially after the
Alban Berg’s Eclectic Serialism
Nazi electoral success in 1933 and their subsequent attempt to overthrow the Austrian government in July of 1934. Whether Berg used ‘FFFF’ as a symbol of resistance, as Jarman has suggested (Jarman 2017), or as a ‘calculated’, opportunistic ‘rapprochement’ to the Nazi Party, as Walton has argued (Walton 2014: 75), its inscription in the concerto points to a network of contradictions with different layers of meaning that defies any single interpretation. Between the private inscriptions and public messages in the Violin Concerto, it is the highly recognisable chorale ‘Es ist genug’, presented as an instrumental reinterpretation of the original message of redemption and transcendence, that keeps inviting interpretations, because it juxtaposes the musical language of the past and present, while representing the most powerful of human experiences: fear, loss, and hope. In its original context, as Eric Chafe has demonstrated, ‘O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort’, BWV 60 occupies a special place amongst Bach’s cantatas because of its message of redemption in death, but also because of its intricate, if not unique, tonal allegory (Chafe 2000: 220–40). Composed for the twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity, this cantata presents a dialogue between two of the most extreme, and perhaps most important, human feelings embodied in the voices of ‘Fear’ and ‘Hope’ in the first three movements. Following the hermeneutics of salvation, the conflict between Fear and Hope can only be resolved through acceptance of death in Christ, whose voice in the fourth movement (‘Selig sind die Toten, die in dem Herrn sterben, von nun an’) marks the shift towards the believer’s acceptance of death and life in eternity. The final movement, ‘Es ist genug’, depicts the new consciousness of the believer, who, now with his hope restored, is ready to leave everything behind and enter ‘heaven’s house’ (‘Himmelshaus’). The original text of the chorale, written by Franz Joaquim Burmeister (1633–72) and set to music by Johann Rudolph Ahle (1625–73), reads: Es ist genug! Herr, wenn es Dir gefällt, so spanne mich doch aus! Mein Jesus kommt: nun gut Nacht, o Welt! Ich fahr’ in’s Himmelshaus. Ich fahre sicher hin mit Frieden mein großer Jammer bleibt darnieden. Es ist genug. It is enough! Lord, if it pleases you, so relieve me of my stress! My Jesus is coming: good night, oh world!
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I journey toward heaven’s house. I go there safely with peace. My great misery stays behind. It is enough.
In light of the conflict between Hope and Fear in the initial movements, the concluding chorale characterises, in Chafe’s words, ‘the return of the believer’s viewpoint to the world below as one that has been transformed by that vision into a new sense of peace and security’ (Chafe 2000: 238). While Berg described his borrowing from ‘Es ist genug’ only briefly in a letter to Schoenberg (Berg and Schoenberg 1987: 466), where he indicated the relationship between the whole-tone tetrachord of the opening melody [A, B, C♯, D♯] and the last four tones of the series (transposed, of course), he must have been aware of the message of the work as a whole. In fact, the setting of the chorale in the concerto, with the alternation between the solo violin and the clarinet ensemble (Part ii, bb. 136–54), seems to reinscribe the conflict between Fear and Hope, and the new ‘consciousness’ of the believer at the end. Berg even provides the original text underlying the orchestration of the chorale. But even here, Berg includes contradictory elements. As Walton has observed, Berg adds expressive instructions in the score that change the eschatological message of this passage in significant ways. The clarinets, whose sound emulates an organ, are instructed to play ‘Poco più mosso, ma religioso’ whereas the solo violin, portraying the inner conflicts of the individual, undergoes a shift from ‘deciso’, ‘doloroso’, and ‘dolce’, at the beginning, to ‘risoluto’ in the middle section, and finally to ‘molto espr[essivo] e amoroso’ at the end. With these instructions, Berg effectively transforms the dialogue between Fear and Hope into expressions of spiritual and sensual love. In effect, Berg secularised the cantata just as Oskar Kokoschka had done with a series of eleven lithographs entitled O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort based on Bach’s Cantata BWV 60 (1914) (Hüneke 2000: 388; cf. Kokoschka 1984: 39). In the sequence of illustrations, the figures of Fear and Hope are replaced with images of Kokoschka and Alma Mahler, with whom he had a relationship around that time (Weidinger 1996: 70–1). The series is therefore an allegory of life experience. As Joseph Paul Hodin points out, in Kokoschka’s O Ewigkeit, ‘art and existence are two contradictory worlds closely linked nevertheless by the mediation of man, whose condition vacillates unceasingly between being, becoming, and fulfilment’ (Hodin 1966: 131). Ultimately, the series represents a journey of self-knowledge. In Kokoschka’s words: ‘The knowledge that comes
Alban Berg’s Eclectic Serialism
from personal experience has an inner force. That experience which releases man from the bondage of transient existence brings the moment of eternal truth comparable to an act of birth. It is the expression of this inner truth which is socially valuable’ (quoted in Hodin 1966: 143). Arguably, it is this journey of self-knowledge through mediation of personal experience in art that proved attractive to Berg. And Berg would not have missed an opportunity to meditate on matters of suffering and transcendence in the second half of the concerto, which begins with a twelve-tone chord that leads to the presentation of the chorale and the set of variations that follows. This section also allowed Berg to convey not only his musical aesthetics, one that embraces serialism and tonality as equals, but also what he considered to be his musical heritage. Of particular significance is the transition to the final section of the Concerto, the ‘Höhepunkt’ of the Allegro (bb. 125–35), which functions as a bridge to the chorale. As Headlam has observed, this section is formed by a ‘monumental combination of pitch and rhythmic cycles’ where Berg lays out eighteen chords, whose top notes comprise eleven pitches, which is complemented by the F held as a pedal in the bass (Headlam 1996: 372). In this transition, the solo violin performs seven trichords [024] transposed cyclically at a perfect fourth while unfolding the melody of the chorale [0246]. This passage leads to the initial statement of the Bach chorale and the beginning of the Adagio section (Figure 5.4). More important, however, is the narrative this passage conveys. In the programme notes Berg provided to Willi Reich, he described the dramatic aspects of the concerto and the role of the solo violin in the following terms: ‘Groans and strident cries for help are heard in the orchestra, choked off by the suffocating rhythmic pressure of destruction. Finally: over a long pedal point – gradual collapse’ (Reich 1974: 179). The solo violin unfolding the whole-tone tetrachord that opens the chorale suggests an answer to the cries for help and the important role the solo violin plays in the narrative of salvation. Indeed, Berg makes clear that in the variations that follow the entrance of the chorale, ‘the soloist with a visible gesture, takes over the leadership of the whole body of violins and violas; gradually they all join in with his melody and rise to a mighty climax before separating back into their own parts’ (quoted in Reich 1974: 179). Starting at bar 170, the soloist is gradually joined by the strings until the concerto reaches its climax (the ‘Höhepunkt’) in bar 186 of the Adagio. At the moment of the climax, the solo violin is indistinguishable from the rest of the strings. Then, from bar 193 to 196, the reverse occurs. The strings drop one by one until the solo violin emerges again with the series P9 (7–11 then 0–6) above statements of ‘Es ist genug’ in the violoncellos.
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Figure 5.4 Pitch reduction of Berg’s Violin Concerto, Part ii, bb. 125 37; after Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Musiksammlung F21 Berg 27, fols. 20 v 21 r
While Pople has related these passages to autobiographical narratives (Pople 1991: 37), I suggest that it is a musical rendering of Schopenhauer’s concept of compassion (Mitleid), much as Wagner had done in his opera Parsifal. An excerpt from The Basis of Morality will provide a way of framing the musical narrative of the passages discussed above, particularly with regard to the relational aspect of suffering: I suffer directly with him [Ich . . . geradezu mit leide], I feel his woe as I ordinarily feel only my own; and, likewise, I directly desire his weal in the same way I otherwise desire only my own. But this requires that I am in some way identified with him, in other words, that this entire difference between me and everyone else, which is the very basis of my egoism, is eliminated, to a certain extent at least. (Quoted in Cartwright 1999: 278; emphasis in original)
Alban Berg’s Eclectic Serialism
The transition to the chorale suggests a complete identification between solo violin and the other strings and a sudden loss of self-identification, realising the ‘pain’ reflected in the orchestra and feeling it as its own, hence the unfolding of the whole-tone tetrachord in anticipation of the chorale. Even here, Berg meditates on his musical heritage, especially his indebtedness to Wagner’s Parsifal. In many respects, the passages above are a sort of instrumental resignification of the transformation that Parsifal undergoes as he resists Kundry’s temptation in Act Two of the opera and feels Amfortas’s pain as his own, after which he realises that only through his leadership would the order of the Knights of the Grail be redeemed. In Berg’s Violin Concerto, the soloist takes the leadership by completely identifying with the string section of the orchestra. In the ‘Höhepunkt’ all differences are eliminated, and the path to ‘redemption’ is reinforced by the variations on ‘Es ist genug’. As Nicholas Baragwanath has argued, Berg’s fascination with Parsifal was instrumental in his understanding of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and may have been even more instrumental in the ways he conceived symmetries in his post-tonal music (Baragwanath 2004; Baragwanath 1999). Berg also must have understood the narrative of redemption in the opera, which informed the way he wanted the solo violin to ‘act’ in the musical narrative of redemption. While the Violin Concerto continues to reveal extra-musical meanings and acquire new ones, the sincerity of Berg’s public dedication to Manon should not be easily dismissed (Walton 2014: 85). If anything, the dedication is an indication of the close relationship between the Bergs and Alma Mahler. Writing to express her condolences to Alma Mahler after the loss of her daughter, Helene Berg made a profound statement – one that captures Berg’s own sentiments towards Alma Mahler and her daughter: ‘Mutzi was not only your child – She was also mine’ (quoted in Stephan 1988: 36). This comment reflects not only a strong empathy but also the philosophical concept of compassion (Mitleid) that underlies the narrative of suffering and transcendence of the concerto. The apparent contradictions, if not the eclectic nature of Berg’s music, his malleable treatment of the series, and the intersections of serialism and tonality in his mature musical language continue to cause uneasiness, especially because his music does not fit any stable analytical models available to us. Headlam’s denial ‘that Berg “fused” twelve-tone techniques with tonality’ (Headlam 1996: 195), Pople’s notion of a ‘synthesis’ of ‘various aspects of his musical world’ (Pople 1997: 220), Ashby’s suggestion that Berg’s use of tonality in his twelve-tone works is ‘performative’ (Ashby 2002: 386), and Walton’s suggestion that Berg was a calculating, opportunistic individual and
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that aspects of his music were possibly insincere seem to confirm the inherent ambiguity in all aspects of Berg’s mature work. Whittall provides a possible way forward, arguing that ‘Berg provided incontrovertible evidence that the “mechanics” of twelve-tone technique need not inhibit the kind of intense and personal musical expression that maintained recognizable and positive links with the expressive gestures of pre-serial composition’ (Whittall 2008: 84). It is arguable, as Whittall has suggested, whether Berg saw what we perceive as contradictions to be incongruous at all, in which case the problem would be ours, depending on our set of expectations and whether we are willing to overlook aspects of Berg’s music or biography.
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Rethinking Late Webern sebastian wedler
Entering into Anton Webern’s twelve-tone music and its complex reception history is like entering into combat with the Hydra: cleave off one head of the Webern myth, and two more grow in its place, often swinging at you from opposite directions. Understandings of late Webern range widely, from that of an intrepid pioneer who, invigorated by his amicable rivalry with his former teacher Arnold Schoenberg, like the ‘Sphinx’ paved the way for the post-war avant-garde (Stravinsky and Craft 1959: 79), to a staunch preserver and guardian of the Austro-German musical tradition committed to pouring ‘new’ music into ‘old’ forms (see Bailey 1991); from an abstractionist with affinities with the cubism familiar from the paintings of Paul Klee (see Perloff 1983), to a composer deeply inspired by the programmatic landscape tropes evoked in so many of the poems that he chose to set to music (see Johnson 1998 and 1999); from a frigid and elitist rationalist looking through the falseness of Romantic subjectivity (see Eimert 1955: 37), preoccupied by ‘logic’, ‘order’, and ‘comprehensibility’ (see Webern 1963), to a relentless ‘expressionist’ (see Quick 2011; Cook 2017) and ‘middle-brow modernist’ (see Miller 2020), with a heightened concern for the sensuous, ephemeral, ineffable qualities of music as sound and for whom reportedly ‘knowledge of [the] serial implications was not required for a full appreciation of [his] music’ (Stadlen 1958: 16); or, from a fairly apolitical citizen, to someone who forsook his support for the social-democratic movement as conductor of the Labour Symphony Concerts to become ‘an unashamed Hitler enthusiast’ (Ross 2008: 323). So how, then, to face the Hydra of mythologies surrounding Webern’s twelve-tone work? Taking the view that, as the polemical clamour in the halls of Darmstadt and beyond has long faded away, it is otiose to keep chopping heads in an attempt to kill off the Hydra once and for all, in this chapter I wish to lay down the sword and take a step back from the I am most grateful to Thomas Ahrend for many conversations that were immensely helpful in refining my thinking on late Webern and to Simon Obert for generously sharing with me his knowledge of the sources at a crucial stage during the research process. Where I quote from German language texts and sources, I provide my own translation. This essay is dedicated to Rudolf Heinz, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Düsseldorf.
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embattled scenes of the past in search of a broader vantage point. Bringing biographical insights into dialogue with analytical, philological and philosophical perspectives, this chapter argues that the crux in understanding late Webern lies in understanding that the competing, often contradictory images of the composer that have emerged pose no real contradictions after all. Instead, in the same way that the Hydra’s separate heads are essentially connected entities, these different images are best understood as mediated with one another on a deeper level, representing different aspects of one and the same all-pervasive aesthetic concern: musical lyricism. A critical shibboleth in Webern scholarship, the category of the lyric is notoriously difficult to define. Cutting across different musical styles and genres, the lyric permeates all levels of Webern’s compositional thinking, posing considerable methodological and interpretative challenges. That said, these challenges can be reframed as heuristic opportunities and a chance to rethink the very essence of Webern’s musical imagination. As Theodor W. Adorno (1999b: 93) once succinctly noted: ‘Webern never departed from [the] idea [of absolute lyricism], whether consciously or not’. In this chapter, I seek to explore, in a perhaps appropriately Webernian manner of ‘six aphorisms’, how the concept of the lyric can be understood to operate in the context of Webern’s twelve-tone music. My aim is thus not to provide a systematic overview of Webern’s late repertoire, nor do I wish to put forward any interpretations of individual works. Instead, I seek to bring into focus and trace out some of the discursive levels of the lyric as a category that arguably, indeed, strikes right at the heart of the Hydra.
Lyricism as Aesthetic Self-Identity I wish to begin with a rather curious fact: although it seems uncontroversial to regard Webern as a genuine musical lyricist – Adornians might be inclined even to say the most important musical lyricist after Franz Schubert – interestingly Webern only began to brand himself publicly as such when Schoenberg had disclosed to the members of his circle the method of twelve-tone composition in the early 1920s (see Hamao 2011). That Webern would forge a public identity as a musical lyricist while simultaneously developing a new identity as a twelve-tone composer is not a purely historical contingency. At the time Webern started to experiment with Schoenberg’s new method (see Shreffler 1994: 285), he was
Rethinking Late Webern
preparing many of his earlier works for publication, following his signing with Universal Edition in 1921, including the Six Bagatelles for string quartet (to become op. 9). The score appeared in print in the summer of 1924, accompanied by an evocative and often cited preface by Schoenberg. In it, Schoenberg, pre-empting potential reservations against the bagatelles’ extreme brevity, asserted that their aphoristic nature is the result of an attempt to ‘express a novel in a single gesture, joy in a single breath’, before concluding that ‘such concentration can only be present in proportion to the absence of self-indulgence’. Built into these lines is an emphatic claim. In juxtaposing the brevity of Webern’s ‘poems’ with the lengths of ‘novels’ (all quotes cited after Moldenhauer 1978: 193), Schoenberg advocated for an understanding of the bagatelles as valid contributions to the formation of the musical aphorism as a genre in its own right (see Obert 2008). Schoenberg’s preface, albeit itself somewhat elusive and not devoid of inconsistencies (see Schmusch 2012), may have made some impression on the members of the Schoenberg circle, especially on Adorno. In 1926, the year after he had joined the circle as a private student of Alban Berg and Eduard Steuermann, Adorno published a review essay on the premiere of the Five Pieces for Orchestra op. 10, conducted by Webern himself on 22 June in Zurich, which – with explicit reference to Schoenberg’s preface – identified the concern for ‘absolute lyricism’ as the linchpin of Webern’s aesthetic (Adorno 1984: 513). Adorno’s essay, initially projected as a ‘theory of the miniature’ (Adorno and Berg 2005: 35), can thus be read as an attempt to reinforce the interpretative vision proffered in Schoenberg’s preface and to put it on sturdy philosophical legs. Yet despite this intellectual kinship, Adorno was quite anxious about how Webern and Schoenberg might respond to his essay. This was for a good reason, as glimpses into his correspondence with Berg reveal. Well before the premiere took place, on 25 December 1925, Adorno had shared with Berg that he was keen to ‘measure the tragic depth of his [Webern’s] [aesthetic] position’ (Adorno and Berg 2005: 35), which he was later to locate in his essay in Webern’s tendency to contract the dialectical principle into the semblance of immediate expression (Adorno 1984). (It is quite conceivable that Adorno is here taking his cue from G. W. F. Hegel, who in his Lectures on Aesthetics (1975: 1133–4, emphasis in the original) discussed the concept of ‘concentration’ as the ‘principle’ for the lyric, admonishing that ‘between an almost dumb conciseness and the eloquent clarity of an idea that has been fully worked out, there remains open to the lyric poet the greatest wealth of steps and nuances’.) When he did not receive
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any feedback from Berg on this specific matter, Adorno increasingly feared that his critical take on Webern may have led to some serious irritations, possibly alienations between him and the Schoenberg circle. It was thus ‘particularly gratifying’ to him to eventually see that Berg, ever generous in his judgements and support, had only kind and approving things to say about the essay upon its publication. Reading between the lines of Berg’s response indicates, however, that Webern and Schoenberg may have been less enthusiastic. Alluding to past frictions and tensions, Berg warned Adorno that ‘a few words and turns of phrase . . . will once more cause offence’. In his reply, aiming to smooth potentially agitated waters, Adorno assured Berg that he had ‘increasingly warmed to his [Webern’s] works’ over the course of time and that ‘some of them . . . truly contain some of the purest, most beautiful lyricism that there is’, before setting great store by the fact that it is ‘precisely’ the ‘forlornness’ so palpable in Webern’s music, both at a ‘private’ and ‘historical’ level, ‘that lends it its radiance’ (Adorno and Berg 2005: 57–60). It is in this sense, he implied, that his (few) critical remarks would be misconstrued if taken as self-indulgent cavilling. Instead, his initial instinct to cast Webern’s concern for ‘absolute lyricism’ in an ambivalent – to recall his own choice of wording, ‘tragic’ – light, pace Schoenberg’s much more affirmative interpretation, is undergirded by the hope that his review may actually help bolster (rather than damage) Webern’s reputation. As Adorno once envisioned with confidence, his work on Webern, not despite but because of its critical overtones, would ‘tactically . . . certainly be of advantage to him [Webern]’ (Adorno and Berg 2005: 35, emphasis in original). Indeed, there is good evidence that Webern recognised the ‘tactical’ value of Schoenberg and Adorno’s writings on his aphoristic music and in fact aligned himself with their interpretations in moments where he found himself cast in a defensive position. So, for instance, in a letter to his publisher Emil Hertzka from 6 December 1927, Webern (1959: 15) used an expression that palpably echoes Adorno’s phrase of ‘absolute lyricism’: ‘I know, of course, that my work has very little importance regarded purely commercially. The cause of this lies in its almost exclusively lyrical nature [!] up to now; poems do not bring in much money, but after all they still have to be written.’ And in a letter dated 4 September 1931 to the conductor Hermann Scherchen, Webern (1945/6: 390) launched an apologetic defence of his aphoristic works clearly alluding to Schoenberg’s preface: ‘sometimes it takes a whole novel to express a single thought; and
Rethinking Late Webern
sometimes no less substantial or few thoughts are condensed into a single short poem’. The striking confidence with which Webern, at this critical stage in his creative development, projected a public image of himself as a musical lyricist opens up some wide-ranging perspectives. Perhaps the question about Webern’s lyrical style is not one of ‘style’ at all, but rather his attitude towards the stylistic means and devices available to him at a given time and the ‘ideas’ he sought to express. In this precise sense, Webern did not compose in a certain ‘style’ – the style of ‘dodecaphony’, ‘free atonality’, or ‘late Romanticism’ – but in the ambit of lyricism. Much of the fascination that thus comes with Webern’s music lies in the sheer plethora of unique strategies that it presents to articulate highly expressive and distinctive physiognomies of the lyric.
Lyricism as Space For the purpose of studying the ways the category of the lyric has shaped Webern’s twelve-tone thinking, his famous lecture series on The Path to the New Music (1932–3) provides some first insights. Although the lyric finds no mention in it, Webern can be shown to interpret some of the key concepts and ideas therein expounded in a decisively ‘lyrical’ light. To illustrate this issue, Webern’s curious ashtray example, presented in his lecture of 26 February 1932, is a particularly pertinent case in point. Having advocated the view that the ‘urge to create coherence [Zusammenhang] has . . . been felt by all the masters of the past’ (a view iterated at various stages), Webern (once again) finds himself in a position where he feels pressed to offer an explanation of what the concept of musical coherence means. Not a man of words, Webern, apparently impromptu, seeks to illuminate the issue as follows: ‘An ashtray, seen from all sides, is always the same, and yet different.’ And he adds: ‘So an idea should be presented in the most multifarious way possible’ (Webern 1963: 53). While one might imagine (with some delight) Webern swirling an ashtray through the air – first holding it up still, before flipping it around again and again – the question begins to emerge what this discussion really reveals about his understanding of musical coherence. Indeed, many of the examples that Webern presents – the treatment of fugal subjects in J. S. Bach’s Musical Offering, the motivic-thematic processes in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and the developing variations characterising Schoenberg’s First String Quartet op. 7 – suggest a reading of the term that
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renders it essentially a linear-developmental principle hingeing on the notion of becoming (see Webern 1963: 35, 52, and 58). Positing these examples with respect to Webern’s discussion might thus lead to an expectation that he would describe the ashtray as the subject of an (irreversible) temporal process – for example, by pondering what it would take for it to be transformed into a different object, say, a pile of fragments. This, however, is not the case. Instead, Webern’s discussion implies that it is the observer’s perspective on the ashtray that changes, while the ashtray itself remains the same. Thus, for Webern, the ‘multifariousness’ that he contends should arise from the presentation of a single musical ‘idea’ does not – in contrast to his many music examples – originate from a genealogical but a perspectival mode of musical thinking, a mode of thinking that György Ligeti (1984: 104) saw as the fundamental crux of Webern’s late aesthetic: the tendency ‘to treat musical time in such a way as to treat it as a spatial phenomenon’. These nested inconsistencies can also be discerned in other parts of Webern’s lectures, such as in his famous discussion of Goethe’s ‘primeval plant’ (Urpflanze). Enshrouded in some esoteric-philosophical ideas about nature and art’s relationship to it, in Webern’s hands the Goethean primeval plant shines forth as nothing less than a (vexed) mirror of aesthetic selflegitimation. On some level, Webern conveniently exploits the genealogical epistemology built into it, both in historical and musical terms. In particular, he avers that the development of the twelve-tone method is the logical consequence of music history as evolutionary progress, and he moreover contends that the concern of past composers ‘to create unity in the accompaniment, to work thematically, to derive everything from one thing’ breathes new air in the domain of twelve-tone composition. However, in other moments of his discussion he, inexplicitly, reverses this genealogical notion into its opposite, a static one. Insomuch as the twelve-tone technique, as an ‘underlying’ method, always already guarantees ‘unity’ and ‘comprehensibility’, he argues, for instance, it has become possible to ‘treat thematic technique much more freely’, before once more making recourse to Goethe’s primeval plant but now – notably – as a paradigmatic model of structural identity: ‘the root is in fact no different from the stalk, the stalk no different from the leaf, and the leaf no different from the flower: variations of the same’ (Webern 1963: 40 and 53). By pointing out these subtle yet fundamental shifts in his explications, I do not wish to suggest that there is anything wrong (or right) with Webern’s discussion. My concern is rather with the ways in which these shifts reveal a constitutive tension in Webern’s musical thinking, one that arguably tends to become all too quickly obfuscated once the categories and ideas expounded in his lectures are taken at face value or considered no
Rethinking Late Webern
more than blueprints of Schoenberg’s theorisation of the concept of musikalischer Gedanke (see Schoenberg 1995). To rephrase the issue in a heretical way: what would be gained, what would be lost, by taking the sceptical-contemplative view that the late Webern may not have understood himself – or, for that matter, Schoenberg?
Lyricism as ‘Variations of the Same’ In seeking to explore the implications of his ashtray example and his discussion of the Goethean primeval plant, it seems apt to attend to Webern’s ubiquitous use of structural symmetries and permutations. Often couched in terms of a complex dialectic between ‘construction’ and ‘expression’, these salient features in Webern’s music have been the subject of enormous analytical efforts. In the following, I will draw upon two theoretical conceptions of harmonic space – the intervallic and transformational ones – as ways of exploring how Webern’s axiomatic concern for ‘variations of the same’ can be considered in analytical terms. Figure 6.1 presents the opening of the string trio fragment M. 273, Webern’s second fully fledged foray into the ‘composition with twelve notes’ in the domain of instrumental music, drafted in spring 1925 a few months after the completion of the Kinderstück M. 267. These bars set up a ‘traditional’ discursivity that evokes the expectation of a ‘developmental’ motion: a two-bar fanfare-like homophonic ‘introduction’ is eventually broken up and ‘liquidised’ into a quasi-polyphonic presentation of distinct ‘motivic’ gestures. In what sense do these two units ‘cohere’ (zusammenhängen)? At first, this passage seems to instantiate a typical case of ‘developing variation’: the gestures emerging in b. 3 are individuated and timbrally distinct yet still operate within the harmonic and rhythmic scope set out in the opening two bars. More specifically, they are based on the melodic contents articulated in bb. 1–2, in other voices: violin 1 harks back to violin 2; and violin 2 and cello hark back to violin 1. This suggests that, in bb. 3ff., Webern was keen to expand the harmonicrhythmic world conjured up in the opening two bars in a new textural guise. Yet Webern’s sensibilities for variation arguably cut a layer deeper. The opening two bars present two complementary chromatic six-note aggregates, effectively yielding the first iteration of the fragment’s twelve-tone row: G♮, F♯, C♯, C♮, G♯, A♮, D♮, E♭, E♮, F♮, B♮, B♭. As Felix Wörner (2003: 77–80) has pointed out, this row is fashioned from three consecutive statements of the symmetrical tetrachord 4–9, the constructive significance of which is highlighted by the linear motions of each voice. On the most
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Rethinking Late Webern Table 6.1: Interval vectors of the 4-7 tetrachord family, based on Forte (1973) Forte number
interval vector
interval succession
4 4 4 4 4
321000 212100 201210 200121 200022
1 1 1 1 1
1 [0123] 3 [0134] 7 [0145] 8 [0156] 9 [0167]
1 2 3 4 5
1 1 1 1 1
Figures 6.2a, b, c Klumpenhouwer network interpretation of Webern’s string trio fragment M. 273, bb. 1 2 and 2{a}, as defined by Lewin (1990) and Klumpenhouwer (1991)
however, comes at the price of what seems at first an infelicitous inconsistency: the first trichord in b. 2 changes from 3–3 (used throughout bb. 1 and 2{a}) to 3–2. Yet interestingly enough, when cast in the light of Klumpenhouwer network theory (‘K-nets’), this new chord (3–2) can be interpreted as sharing the same transformational logic as the opening trichord (3–3) from b. 1 (Figure 6.2a). It is, of course, not uncommon that chords with different interval properties feature an identical set of transformations. In this specific context, however, it seems not implausible to ascertain a certain degree of transformational consistency. For instance, the tetrachords 4–1, 4–7, and 4–9 shown in
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Figures 6.2b and 6.2c can all be construed as hingeing on the same (strongly isographic, ) transformation as said trichords from bb. 1 and 2. This analytical perspective has implications for an understanding of the semitone (ic1) which so conspicuously permeates these bars. While the ‘relational abundance’ of K-nets prompts intricate questions (not least) about the phenomenological viability of K-net-derived analytical insights (see Buchler 2007), this perspective renders the semitone conceivable as the ‘identical’ subject of a transformational ‘variation’. Thus what one hears on a material level are de facto actualisations of virtualities, indeed not dissimilar from Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the term as the differential condition of all that which manifests itself as real experience (Deleuze 1997: chapter 4; see also Ahrend 2017: 34–9). Such observations offer some fascinating glimpses into the philosophical and compositional complexities of Webern’s lyrical imagination, suggesting that his concern for ‘variations of the same’ is inextricably bound up with a fundamentally altered conception of musical temporality and phenomenology.
Lyricism as Song Within the topographies of Webern’s lyrical thinking, the genre of the song marks a particularly intimate place, to the extent that its significance in the context of his adaptation of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method can hardly be overstated. At the time Schoenberg ‘discovered’ the twelve-tone technique, Webern in fact had been on a long hiatus from the composition of instrumental music. As Anne Shreffler (1994: esp. 279) has pointed out, Webern’s decision to exclusively focus on the composition of texted music following the completion of the Three Little Pieces for Violoncello and Piano op. 11 in June 1914 was above all a response to the struggles he felt during these years to compose longer works. When Webern thus turned, in the summer of 1922 with the song ‘Mein Weg geht jetzt vorüber’ op. 15/4, to the ‘composition with twelve tones’, this was not born out of an acute artistic ‘crisis’; rather, the twelve-tone technique primarily served him then as an expressive device, one of many in his toolbox, to convey musically the semantic qualities and envoiced subjectivities he sensed radiating from the poems he chose. (This may help to explain why, baffling to many, Webern’s adaptation of Schoenberg’s technique did not develop in a stepwise, evolutionary fashion but took place over many years with varying degrees of engagement and complexity.) The fragment M. 276 for a song based on Peter Rosegger’s poem ‘Dein Leib geht jetzt der Erde zu’ allows some insightful glimpses into Webern’s
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the effect that the instrumental group is an iridescent reflection of the vocal line, thereby intensifying the elegiac qualities evoked by the text. Webern begins the compositional process by setting out the melody for the first two lines (which right from its inception seems to be set in stone): ‘Dein Leib geht jetzt der Erde zu, / Woher er ist gekommen.’ Webern is here clearly guided by a concern to use all twelve notes of the row, and to do so in such a way that the twelve notes are distributed equally over the two lines. This concern to map the twelve notes onto the formal structure of the poem, however, may have posed some practical challenges for Webern insomuch as the number of syllables used in each line (eight and seven, respectively) does not match the number of notes reserved for each of them (six). The compositional solution Webern finds is insightful. Rather than ignoring the irregular number of syllables and sticking rigorously to the distribution of one note per syllable, he makes a few adjustments: he repeats the first, second and seventh notes so as to maintain the even distribution of six plus six notes per line. In this way, he aligns the presentation of the twelve-tone row with the predetermined formal structure of the text. Curiously, for the stanza’s third and fourth lines – ‘Der Seel’ wünscht man die ewige Ruh’, / Bei Gott und allen Frommen’ – Webern at first seems to take a more flexible approach. He reserves for the nine-syllable third line the first seven (not six) notes of the row; and for the seven-syllable fourth line he in fact adds one note, setting out the word ‘allen’ as a three-note melisma. As a result, the row is used up before the fourth line has come to an end. But this decision, too, is quite conceivably motivated by a form-syntactical consideration. The notes used for the line’s last word ‘Frommen’ are yet again recruited from the beginning of the row, lending the stanza a framing effect which is possibly intended to contribute to a sense of closure while at the same time offering interlocking options for continuation. Webern appears to have abandoned his work on the song at this advanced stage. The reasons may remain unknown. It would be his last setting of a poem by Rosegger. He would thereafter devote himself exclusively to the poetry of Hildegard Jone, an artistic connection that would inspire with the Three Songs from ‘Viae inviae’ op. 23, the Three Songs op. 25, Das Augenlicht op. 26, and the two Cantatas opp. 29 and 31, some of his most iconic explorations of the dialectical relationship between vocal expressivity and musical construction.
Lyricism as Silence The Symphony op. 21, completed in June 1928, three years after the string trio fragment M. 273 and ‘Dein Leib geht jetzt der Erde zu’ M. 276, is
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commonly considered to mark a sea change in the development of Webern’s late style. Already some cursory glimpses into the field of metaphors that emerged right after Webern’s death may give a taste. In his 1949 monograph on Schoenberg and His School, René Leibowitz (1949b: 210–7) discerned in Webern’s Symphony a turn to ‘greatest purity’ and an ‘extraordinary economy of means’, identifying in the work’s ‘almost complete immobility’ a tendency towards the ‘emission of isolated tones’. This mode of reception, which would only a few years later inspire Herbert Eimert’s (controversial) coinage of the term ‘pointillism’, was also shared by Adorno (2015: 18) who, though considerably more sceptical in his philosophical assessment, similarly saw in the Symphony a ‘peculiar [penchant for] simplification [eigentümliche Simplifizierung]’ and sense of ‘utmost demureness [grösste Zurückhaltung]’. How profoundly puzzling and enigmatic Webernians found the stylistic veneer of the post-op. 21 works is perhaps particularly apparent in a fervid exchange between Franz Krämer and Glenn Gould: kra¨mer: I was . . . I was, you know, studying with Webern one . . . one season, in a class with other people . . . gould [affirmatively]: Hm. kra¨mer: . . . and he was a very shy person . . . gould [affirmatively]: Hm. kra¨mer: . . . as his music is: rather shy. gould [sceptically]: ‘Is this shy music?’ [Gould plays the second movement from Webern’s Piano Variations op. 27. When he stops playing both begin speaking simultaneously.] gould: ‘It’s not exactly shy music, you know.’ kra¨mer [inaudible]: . . . but it’s spare, it’s . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . I . . . I’d still call it . . . rather, rather . . . gould: Well, it’s . . . it’s reticent . . . kra¨mer: . . . it’s small . . . gould: . . . it’s reticent, really. kra¨mer: . . . reticent and he was very, very reticent. And there is no doubt about that. gould: This is shy music . . . [Gould plays the first movement from Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, bb. 1 47.] kra¨mer [interjecting]: Schubert? (Kroiter and Koenig 1959)
Purity, simplification, reticence. Despite the profusion of metaphors used to describe Webern’s ostensibly new lyrical style, there is a shared understanding that the post-op. 21 works evoke a strange sense of silence. Indeed, Webern’s treatment of the rest as a constructive rather than rhetorical
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mirrored in b. 94. Fed into such a constructive metabolism, these crotchet and full bar rests can be considered to mark a negative presence. It is in this precise sense that in Webern the ‘silence’, structurally determined, enters the status of ‘material’, and thus is materialised. Given the tight relationship between rests and harmonic organisation, it is not hard to see why this type of musical thinking was regarded as a precursor to what Karlheinz Stockhausen (1959: 12) came to identify as the cornerstone of post-war serialism: the ‘attempt to put the timeproportions of the elements in order, by means of a series’. Any such ‘proto-serial’ interpretation of Webern is not uncontroversial, however. As can be glimpsed in Peter Stadlen’s first-hand account, Webern considered the Symphony by no means a caesura in his development but rather a natural continuation of the expressive idiom that he had cultivated in his previous works. Going into detail about Webern’s disappointment when a performance of the Symphony in Vienna (to which Stadlen had accompanied him) reduced the work to no more than ‘seemingly unconnected little shrieks and moans’, Stadlen reports that the dissatisfied composer, by that time himself a much-celebrated conductor, demonstrated to him how the music was initially conceived – namely, essentially, as a rich discourse of expressive gestures. Stadlen takes this discrepancy as the starting point for a razor-sharp reflection. Relating the difficulties in communicating to the musicians the plasticity of embodiment Webern was apparently hoping to obtain to issues of ‘metrical complexity’, he wrote: ‘not too many things going on at the same time, but too few things at the required time . . . and so we are robbed of one of the basic prerequisites of all musical understanding: our ability to feel the regular beat of the metre and to relate to it the rhythms we listen to’ (Stadlen 1958: 10–6). Indeed, as Kathryn Bailey (1995) has shown based on a philologically rigorous analysis of the sketches for the Symphony op. 21, the Piano Variations op. 27, and the String Quartet op. 28, there is good evidence that Webern treated rhythm and metre as two fairly independent parameters, to the extent that he, seemingly with ease, could change the metre of whole passages at various stages throughout the compositional process apparently without fearing that these surgeries might interfere with the rhythmic identity of the gestures he sought to express. These insights, I wish to venture, can be interpreted as bringing yet another lyrical quality of Webern’s ‘silences’ to the fore, one that is less defined by virtue of their (material) ‘presence’ but rather the engendering of what could be termed (phenomenological) ‘presencing’. As suggested in Figure 6.5c, the ‘pulse’ of the Symphony’s final variation, though notated in
Rethinking Late Webern
2 , can no less (im)plausibly be heard in 3 . This metrical vacillation causes 4 4 a bewildering effect. While due to the symmetrical setting the final gesture F♮5–B♮2 falls, unlike in the corresponding b. 89, onto the second (weak) beat of the bar, if conceived in triple metre this gesture falls yet again onto the first (strong) beat. In so doing, it insinuates a sense of continuation that never materialises. Couched in Edmund Husserl’s terminology, the consecutive triple-metre pulse can thus be understood as instantiating a trace of ‘retentive memory’ through which, virtually, the final gesture – ‘protentively’ – travels beyond the final bar line. In this sense, the final gesture is at once ‘closing’ the work and staring into the ‘openness’, freezing in this climate of structural ambivalence to a ‘tone-now [Tonjetzt]’ (Husserl 1964: §§11, 38, and 39) that, ecstatically, seemingly stands outside of time.
Lyricism as Politics As deeply fascinating as Webern’s lyrical imagination is on some level, it undeniably also comprises a troubling political dimension. This is perhaps nowhere else more poignantly encapsulated than in his admiration for the poetry of Stefan George. Webern had set several of George’s poems to music around 1907 to 1909, the famous years in which he had embarked upon his self-proclaimed ‘path’ to atonality, and published many of them between 1919 and 1923 as opp. 2–4. Later in his life, Webern seems to have seen his interest in George’s poetry vindicated, through disturbing signs. As Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer (1978: 526–32) were able to reconstruct, in a letter to his friend Josef Hüber in December 1940 Webern heralded George’s poem collections The Star of the Covenant and The New Reich as prophecies of a new social world order that he saw now – at a time the Wehrmacht had invaded Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France, and Mussolini’s Italy had occupied parts of north Africa – become reality. And still two years later – following the Wehrmacht’s first setbacks – he evidently turned to George’s poetry as a source for optimism (see also Bailey 1998: ch. 8, esp. 172–3). To be sure, the sources known today indicate that Webern’s views of National Socialism may have been more ambiguous than an isolated reading of his correspondence with Hüber suggests (see Krones 1999). But these biographical documents do raise some far-reaching questions. While Webern’s interest in poetry itself may not have instigated his enthusiasm for the war, it stands to reason that he, personally prone to succumbing to authorities and consistently in pursuit
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of securities and stabilities in his private life, found in the new-symbolist tropes he felt so drawn to throughout his lifetime a resonance chamber for a type of identity-thinking that retrospectively tallied all too well with Nazi ideology. This renders Webern’s musical lyricism, as little as it seems to have in common with Nazi cultural politics at first glance, politically septic. The question however of how, if at all, this ideological dimension is manifest in the fibre of Webern’s compositional thinking taps into some formidable methodological challenges. For Richard Taruskin (2009: 397; see also 2005a: 734–41), the case is surprisingly clear. With reference to the heaped occurrences of the B-A-C-H cipher through the technically ‘dehumanised’ String Quartet op. 28, he paints a picture of Webern (alongside Schoenberg) as a relentless ‘chauvinist’ for whom ‘Bach was a third Bach, a national as well as a universal figurehead . . . [whose] elaboration of the technique of absolute music . . . vouchsafed German domination’. And he proceeds to cock a snook at Carl Dahlhaus as the key post-Adornian advocate for the concept of aesthetic autonomy, contending with heretic joy that not even Webern’s ‘absolute’ music is unencumbered from ideology. Once read as calling out large strands of Webern reception for depoliticising the composer, Taruskin’s biting polemical attack, while valuable, arguably throws the baby out with the bathwater. By stripping the concept of aesthetic autonomy from the heuristic potential it holds for understanding the relationship between music and politics, Taruskin’s account may be considered somewhat myopic. As Julian Johnson (1999: 223) has argued, ‘art does not offer a critique of society by having nothing to do with it, but by reordering and reformulating social categories in aesthetic form’. With Johnson’s caveat in mind, identifying musical ciphers as if they were traffic signs is in effect to retreat to an essentialist position, one that arguably all too quickly runs aground at the question of how these meanings are negotiated in the individual work. Indeed, as Thomas Ahrend (2018: 32) has suggested, the musical structures to which Webern’s particular ‘psycho-social disposition’ gave rise are best understood as fulfilling an aesthetic rather than a personal function, and thus ‘dynamised’ in the individual work they may as a matter of fact ‘undermine [their initial status as] merely preconceived representations of order’. The irony is that Taruskin, if he had been willing to pursue a perspective drawing on aesthetic autonomy, could have found in his arch-enemy Adorno a well-disposed interlocutor. Adorno remained wary of certain
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aspects of Webern’s aesthetics throughout his lifetime. In particular, in his post-war writings on the composer it becomes palpable how he recoiled from Webern’s late works. ‘The fear that the act of composition might damage the notes leads to a vanishment [of subjectivity] . . . hardly anything happens anymore; intentions [in the music] scarcely make any impression, and instead he [Webern] sits in front of his notes and their basic relationships with his hands folded as if in prayer’. In my reading, the issue for Adorno was thus not simply that in Webern the rational patina of the twelve-tone method had hardened into the dogma of orders (Gesetze) but, more specifically, that the ‘rich interplay’ facilitated through this hardening produced no musical moments of immanent transcendence (Adorno 1999b: 101–2, translation amended). What Adorno recognised was rather that the differential relations – Arnold Whittall (1987) felicitously speaks of ‘multiple meanings’ – woven into Webern’s tightly controlled fabric annul any motions of even the slightest dialectical sparkle, into a state of ‘oscillations’ (see Ahrend 2018: 32). To overstate the issue slightly: in his search for ‘Hegel’ in a desperate attempt to save the dialectic in Webern, Adorno only found that the composer had turned the quasi-Heideggerian vice of tautological ontology into a virtue. Adorno, the Hegelian, captured this critical twist in his own appropriately dialectical terms, as follows: ‘In Hegel’s Phenomenology we encounter at one point the disconcerting phrase “fury of disappearance”: Webern’s work converted this into his angel’ (Adorno 1999b: 94). Put differently, what made Webern’s ‘absolute lyricism’ so ‘tragic’ for Adorno is that it remains precisely underdetermined as to whether it obsecrates unity (‘variations of the same’) or difference (‘variations of the same’). There is a remarkable moment in the third movement of the First Cantata op. 29 that allows some deep glimpses into what, in a post-Adornian vein, I like to think of as Webern’s musical obsecration (Figure 6.6). Entrenched in the theosophical discourses of its time (see Abbate 2018), the text that Webern chose to set – an extract from a (lost) poem entitled ‘Transfiguration of the Charites [Verwandlung der Chariten]’ which Jone had sent to him in early 1939 – casts Apollo’s music for the Gods in the light of solemn metamorphosis. According to Jone’s own interpretation (1959: 7), the ‘Verwandlung’ mentioned in the title rests essentially on three steps: firstly, the text associates Apollo’s music-making with ‘inexpressibly melancholy’, the ‘deities’ of which are then ‘silenced’ and ‘absorbed in . . . eternal meaning’, before eventually an ‘amazing transformation takes place’ that amounts to a revelation of ‘joyful astonishment’. The final lines read: ‘Charis,
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aesthetically insightful. Following a transition played in the strings and harp that unmistakably represents Apollo’s ‘blessed strings’ (bb. 34–8), to the words ‘all the former names have faded away in sounds’ the music eventually bursts out quietly into a fully fledged arrangement, with four different rows running in parallel (using notably all four row types on the same transposition step), played in stretto, and which ‘liquidises’ the two subjects staged in the opening through tightly knit fugal-variational processes (bb. 39–43) (see Bailey 1991: 292–302, 342, 396–7). It is as if Apollo’s ‘sound’ has collapsed onto itself, and we now, in piano, begin to vaguely gain a sense of the ‘former names’ reverberating before they ‘fade away’ into oblivion. This compositional realisation, it strikes me, epitomises the aesthetic model of Webern’s musical obsecration. By literally sounding out the structural-semantic depths of Apollo’s ‘sound’, this passage, highly differentiated, asserts only itself, rendering the notions of transcendence and presence in terms of an ontological double-bind. How can this passage be understood in political terms? Webern turned to the composition of the Cantata four months after the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany and apparently found in this text the appropriate missing piece to bring this work to completion. In her contribution to the special Webern issue of Die Reihe, published ten years after the end of the Second World War, Jone invited a reading of the Cantata essentially as an anti-war piece of music, as a piece of consolation and comfort composed during the darkest of times. Recalling how she had heard the Cantata for the first time in August 1940, in the company of Webern and his student Ludwig Zenk, she wrote (not timid about speaking for all three of them): ‘the music, heard by us here in the neighbourhood of the bells, is no other than the sparkle of the grace of Grace, in the midst of the war. We cannot forget the war while listening to the music, but we are given something to take back into the dark with us and to give us light’ (Jone 1959: 7). This account seems difficult to square with all the evidence known to us today about the war enthusiasm Webern (and Zenk) harboured at that time (see Hommes 2010). Without meaning to perpetuate superfluous speculations over Webern’s intentions, one may wonder whether it is not also conceivable that Webern construed the text in a nationalisticheroic light and specifically perceived in the ‘former names’ reverberating through Apollo’s ‘melancholic’ sound those not-yet-realised forces that he also perceived in George’s poetic vision. But if that was the case, the redemptive power of transcendence Jone claimed to be inscribed into Webern’s setting would stand revealed as the ultimate terror of presence. Was Webern’s otherworldly lyricism – according to Eimert (1959: 32), ‘an outsider’s world in the extremest sense’ – perhaps all too painfully worldly after all?
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Milton Babbitt and ‘Total’ Serialism andrew mead
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Milton Babbitt has regularly been accepted as one of the earliest adopters of what has come to be known as integral, total, or, most often in its European flavour, multiple serialism. Many European composers of the midtwentieth century, including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, and Jean Barraqué have been central to this movement, and painted with a broader brush, it would include contributions by the likes of Olivier Messiaen and Elizabeth Lutyens. What sets Babbitt apart from this group encompasses both his compositional techniques and his roots as an American musician. In the following, I will concentrate on the former, with at the very least an awareness of the latter. Milton Babbitt grew up in the city of Jackson, Mississippi, but also spent a significant amount of time with a branch of his family in Philadelphia. He played the clarinet from an early age and was a member of a variety of ensembles during those years. His awareness of musical structure would seem to be precocious. He narrates becoming aware of local and long-range note relationships in a performance of Weber’s Oberon overture and mentioned on several occasions receiving scores of modernist music, including some works of Arnold Schoenberg, from an uncle who regularly travelled in Europe. His study with Marion Bauer in New York City reinforced his interest in the most recent developments in music composition (Babbitt 1976). While Babbitt wrote a handful of pieces employing more traditionally tonal techniques, some of the earliest fragments available show that he had absorbed the lessons of Arnold Schoenberg’s method of composition employing twelve notes only related to each other from the very start (see Brody 1993). Owing to his activities during the Second World War, Babbitt did not start publishing music until 1947, the year of the Three Compositions for Piano and the Composition for Four Instruments. With these two works, Milton Babbitt set the stage for what was to become a career-long development of a remarkably fruitful and flexible compositional technique. Babbitt’s compositional interests grow from a close reading of both Arnold Schoenberg’s and Anton Webern’s twelve-tone techniques.
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However, while both Schoenberg and Webern saw their music as connecting with and furthering the traditions of European, in particular Germanic, composition, Babbitt was interested in exploring what he saw as the profound differences between the first principles of scale-based music and those of music based on successive orderings of the total chromatic. Both Schoenberg and Webern, each in his own way, sought to infuse such traditional formal practices as the sonata-allegro or theme and variations with the relational possibilities derivable from the use of twelve-tone rows. Babbitt, on the other hand, was interested in imagining a music whose every element of formal practice might derive ab novo from those same possibilities (Babbitt 1976). This is not to say that Babbitt was totally disconnected from the musical past, especially his own musical past. But his position with regard to making music was inevitably different from that of his European predecessors. He was an American, and while he had a solid grounding in Old World musical traditions, he was also steeped in the rich variety of American music making as well. Nor was he intent on throwing over the received instrumental traditions of Europe. While he was a pioneer in electronically produced music, part of his adoption of the synthesizer can be attributed to his apparent frustration with many of his experiences with live performance (see Babbitt 1958, 1962, 1965, and 1970). But he remained until the very end of his life dedicated to music as something that was made by living players in real time. In fact, with the exception of three solo synthesized works, Babbitt’s use of pre-recorded taped music was generally coordinated with one or more live performers, and those compositions that use synthesis are a relatively small corner of his work as a whole. Babbitt’s writing for traditional instruments might be, or might have been at one time, found extremely demanding and well outside of what would have been considered idiomatic, but his actual use of traditional instruments was largely conservative in nature, drawing on well-established playing techniques and frequently recognising the different capabilities of instruments as a factor in how his musical imagination could be brought to sounding life through them. A fundamental factor of twelve-tone composition as Babbitt understood Schoenberg’s compositional practice derives from the profound difference between what a note, or pitch, or pitch class, might mean in a tonal context as opposed to the context of the twelve-note aggregate. In traditional tonal music, a sounding pitch takes on meaning from its context within a given diatonic collection. The pitch class C, for instance, is without meaning until it is heard as embodying a scale degree. Scale degrees in tonal music are
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therefore the smallest unit of structural, or grammatical, meaning, with pitch being the articulator thereof. In music based on a sequence of aggregates – complete or for all intents and purposes complete presentations of the twelve pitch classes – aggregates are the smallest unit of structural meaning, taking on their individuality from the ways their constituent elements, the twelve pitch classes, are distributed within them. Aggregates compose the heard surface of the music; twelve-tone rows, deployed in a variety of ways, therefore can become a way of controlling how aggregates are structured and how they can then be deployed in chains of associational relationships (Babbitt 1976). I have gone into this in some detail in order to make a fundamental point that Babbitt was to take on in a variety of ramifications: an aggregate represents a total compendium of possibilities (the twelve equaltempered pitch classes), which adopts a recognisable profile by the ways those pitch classes and the intervallic relations amongst them are distributed within it. It is possible to generalise this into a wide variety of musical situations and give it a name: the idea of maximal diversity. This became a kind of guiding principle, which saturates Babbitt’s technical developments throughout his creative life. Such a principle can be read as being completionist, but it need not be so. One could imagine a list of possibilities that itself was not complete, but which contained no repetitions, such as all of the trios and duos of a group of six different instruments. Such lists occur in a variety of instances throughout Babbitt’s life, but they exist alongside lists that are in fact complete; their shared characteristic is a lack of repetition (Bernstein 2016). Babbitt recognised that this principle could be articulated in a variety of ways in multiple musical dimensions, not just in pitch. But he also recognised that each of these dimensions was limited and determined by the different ways whereby listeners could perceive relationships within them. The linear nature of pitch in register is made cyclical by the ability to perceive octaves, and thus pitch class. Time is also linear, but not inherently cyclical, although cyclicity can be made manifest through compositional means. Dynamics are linear, but absolute intensity is not how people tend to hear. In fact, intensity can be a factor not only of some absolute decibel measure; it is also readily mediated through the means by which a sound is produced. Babbitt’s music reflects a keen awareness of the difference amongst instruments, for example, not so much by changing its qualities based on how a given instrument is played, but by taking advantage of the ways different instruments (or voices) can traverse similar pitch and intervallic landscapes. Thus, for Babbitt, the idea of total serialism was
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not an arbitrary application of abstract ideas to perceptually or structurally incommensurate musical dimensions. Rather, it involved a subtle awareness of both the similarities and dissimilarities of how we perceive the various dimensions conjoined in a musical utterance. In order to impart a greater understanding of his practice, I will deal with each musical dimension individually in a process of limning a sketch of Babbitt’s compositional technique. **** As mentioned above (p. 108), Babbitt derived a great deal of his manner of treating pitch from both Schoenberg and Webern. From Schoenberg, he adopted the technique of combining more than one member of a row class to form an aggregate. Schoenberg’s primary way of doing so has become known, largely from Babbitt’s own writings, as inversional hexachordal combinatoriality, in which two rows are combined so that the first six elements and the last six elements of each form aggregates. From Webern, Babbitt adopted the technique of deriving a row from a single ordered trichord, representing the four traditional twelve-tone transformations within the body of the row itself (see Babbitt 2003). These two techniques combined yielded the trichordal array, a structure that in various guises underlies much of the music of Babbitt’s first compositional period and persists in one form or another throughout his career. Figure 7.1 shows the trichordal array found at the outset of his Composition for Four Instruments. This example additionally shows how the trichords are deployed at the opening of that work, but one may read the example simply as a presentation of a trichordal array. As one may observe, each line (or ‘lyne’, the term coined to described individual strings of pitch classes in a musically uninterpreted array) forms an aggregate based on the four transformations of a trichord type, in the same way as the four quadrants of the array (arising from the hexachordal combinatoriality of the two distinct pairs of lynes) and its four columns (Kassler 1967). This has the effect of spreading the influence of any given trichord out over three different aggregate interpretations. Should one interpret such an array as projected by two pairs of similar instruments, then one can readily track how a given trichord could be heard as part of a lyne articulated by, say, a flute playing in counterpoint with the other three instruments; as contributing to an aggregate formed by a pair of like instruments, for example a flute and a clarinet; or as contributing to a combined texture of flute, clarinet, plus a pair of stringed instruments.
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Figure 7.1 Trichordal array composed into fifteen subsets of four elements
Trichordal arrays provide opportunities for flexibility in a variety of ways. First, as may be seen in Figure 7.1, individual lynes do not necessarily have to be made from members of the same row class; indeed, in most cases they cannot be and still yield the same range of trichordal transformations in every position. Second, in creating such structures out of individual trichords, it is possible to use different orderings of constituent trichords, or even to vary the number of trichord types being used in their realisation. In the Composition for Four Instruments, Babbitt used two different orderings of two different trichord types over the span of the work, combined in a carefully controlled variety of ways. While indeed one may construct a row class in which the elements are made from one each of these four possible orderings, no actual member of this row class appears at the surface of the music. While a row is a particular ordering of the twelve
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pitch classes, a row class is the collection of all those rows that may be related by a set of operations. Thus, the classical forty-eight-member row class would include all those rows related by transposition, inversion, and retrograde in all possible combinations. Several of Babbitt’s works from the late 1940s and 1950s explore the range of possibilities inherent in the construction of trichordal arrays. A second opportunity for compositional flexibility afforded by trichordal arrays entails the ways aggregates may be realised on a musical surface. I suggested that lynes might be articulated by individual instruments, but register or playing manner within a given instrument may be used as well. In his compositions using trichordal arrays, as well as those using different kinds of array structure, Babbitt explored a wide variety of ways of projecting his musical elements. In any array with multiple lynes, pitch or pitch-class order is only specified within lynes but remains undetermined between lynes. This affords many opportunities for compositional interpretation and the creation of surface details that can be used to coordinate with details projected in different passages of the piece. A particular basic pattern that Babbitt regularly used with trichordal arrays may be found in the ways trichords are displayed in Figure 7.1. In this example, each aggregate divides its trichords into either a grouping of one trichord and three trichords, or two pairs of trichords, or all four trichords at once. Since there are four possibilities for doing the first, three for the second, and one for the last, such a pattern will require two iterations of a trichordal array to be complete. These two iterations are normally related to each other using some basic twelvetone transformation. We can think of this kind of pattern both as a series of partitions of four elements or as a particular ordering of the fifteen non-zero subsets of four elements, in this case trichords. As can be noted in the current example, the disposition of a single ordering of a single trichord type has enabled the array to be disposed to present all possible transformations of the ordered trichord in all possible combinations and locations. This, of course, is another manifestation of what I have suggested is a guiding principle of maximal diversity in Babbitt’s work. Such a disposition of trichords still does not determine completely the composition of any given aggregate in an array, but it does limit the possibilities in intriguing ways. Tracking all the possibilities Babbitt used for working within these constraints is beyond the scope of this essay, but doing so allows one to realise the balance between the self-imposed rules of
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play and the inventive response to opportunities thus provided that is always a lively presence in Babbitt’s music. The pattern found in Figure 7.2 with trichords is something Babbitt employed with other musical dimensions as well. In the case of the Composition for Four Instruments, Babbitt used an analogous pattern applied to the ensemble as a whole to determine the piece’s fifteen sections. It also informs the number and variety of combinations of his four different ordered trichords over the span of the piece. This means that the last section of the work, analogous to the combination of all four lynes in the array of Figure 7.1, is the only passage in which all four instruments participate, with all four ordered trichords. As the pattern appears in reverse order at this point in the work, it is only the opening aggregate of the final section in which all four ordered trichords and all four instruments are sounded together. This is illustrated in Table 7.1 and Figure 7.2. Much of Babbitt’s music of the late 1950s and early 1960s shows his interest in extending his compositional practice. Works such as All Set (1957), the Composition for Tenor and Six Instruments (1960), PostPartitions (1966), and Philomel (1964) each take new steps in creating an unfolding counterpoint of lynes derived in whole or in part from a work’s row class. From this developed a practice that underlies much of his later music, the use of all-partition arrays. Like a trichordal array, an allpartition array is comprised of lynes unfolding simultaneously, but unlike the earlier practice, all-partition arrays feature a unique disposition of lyne segments for each aggregate. Babbitt devised several all-partition arrays based on four, six, or twelve lynes (there is one example of an eight-part array, employed in his Third String Quartet (1970)). In general, Babbitt’s all-partition arrays are built from hexachordally combinatorial lyne pairs, the number of which are determined (usually) by the number of distinct pairs of complementary hexachords found in a work’s row class. Thus, for example, an all-partition array whose underlying row class is built using the hexachord type 014589 would only contain two hexachordally combinatorial lyne pairs, given that there are only two distinct pairs of such
Table 7.1 Instrumental disposition in Composition for Four Instruments Flute Clarinet Violin Cello
X| X|X |X ||X | X|X |X || X |X |X | X||X | X| X|X || X| X|X | X||X |X | X|X || X|X | X|X || X|X | X|X ||
Milton Babbitt and ‘Total’ Serialism
Figure 7.2 Trichordal disposition in the last section of Composition for Four Instruments
hexachords. On the other hand, an all-partition array built with 012678 would have three lyne pairs, while ones built using 012345, 023457, or 024579 would contain six lyne pairs, owing to the number of distinct pairs of hexachords available in each type. Each such all-partition array contains all the possible combinations of lyne segment lengths to form its aggregates. Table 7.2 is a chart of the seventy-seven possible ways of partitioning twelve parts into lyne segments of various lengths, while Figure 7.3 is a short segment of a four-part array composed of the thirty-four ways of combining lyne segments of various lengths derived from at most four parts. Since the construction of such arrays by hand is fairly difficult, and because they are easily adaptable for multiple interpretations, Babbitt tended to reuse the same relatively small number of arrays in several pieces. These pieces remain distinct from each other due to the individuality of both lyne projection and aggregate composition, but listeners can often infer ‘family resemblances’ amongst pieces sharing arrays. All-partition arrays also impose a kind of rhythmic flux on a composition, owing to their constantly changing aggregate shapes. An aggregate containing ten
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Table 7.2 The seventy-seven possible ways of partitioning twelve parts into lyne segments of various lengths Number of parts: 1 2 3 Segment length:
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
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12
1 112 6
2 3
5
522 543
521 2 5421 5321 5322 6412 6321 623 7312 8212
6
62
7 8
75 84
9 10 11 12
93 10 2 11 1
651 642 632 741 831 822 921 10 12
21 32215
21 3217
42214 4315
4216
418
52213 5314
5215
517
6313 62212
6214
616
7213 814
715
424 43221 43212 42212 5413 53212 5231
4322 4 22 2 4231
3 6
21 32313 3 216
322 3 322212
43
4 4
2 3241 32214 3313 42212 43213 4214
34 3321
4
5 2
2 8
21 319
21
10
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12
elements in one lyne and two in another will, depending on how lynes are being projected, sound quite different from an aggregate using four trichords, or three tetrachords, or six dyads. The greatest potential difference between two aggregates in a twelve-lyne all-partition array will of course be between the aggregate that is made of a single row in one lyne and that which is made from one element each in all twelve lynes. This difference should also imply the range of possible aggregate composition, from the totally restricted (a single row in one lyne) to the totally free (each lyne having a single element). A couple of vivid musical examples arise in the piano work Post-Partitions, where the registral sweep of the opening bars is contrasted in the middle of the piece where an aggregate is projected in the middle octave of the piano; one may also point to a passage heard not long after the opening of Relata I (1965), where, after a lot of activity
Milton Babbitt and ‘Total’ Serialism
Figure 7.3 The opening block of a four part all partition array
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throughout the orchestra, one can hear a trombone slowly and solemnly uttering a long string of notes against a held sonority. Both of these passages absolutely depend on the varying shapes of the aggregates within their arrays. One additional concept that emerges in this period of Babbitt’s music derives from his techniques for transforming an array. It is easy to see how one might perform the familiar twelve-tone transformations of transposition, inversion, and retrogression on an array as a whole, but to this Babbitt added the circle-of-fifths transformation (or multiplication by 5 (or 7), mod 12), and a technique of inverting each distinct lyne pair by the index number (a representation of the inversional axis) that would preserve its hexachordal content. In the former case, the result is an array that preserves all of the distributional aspects of the original, while shifting intervals in predictable ways. This technique is not usually found within a composition but can be seen to relate arrays of two different pieces. The latter case, however, occurs frequently within a given work and can have a dramatic effect on the musical surface. Inverting an array around a single axis will preserve columnar aggregates but will map the hexachordal contents of lyne pairs onto each other in predictable ways. Inverting each lyne pair by its own axis preserves the hexachordal content of each lyne pair but plays havoc with the columnar aggregates of the array. The result has been called ‘weighted aggregates’, in that under this kind of transformation what had been an aggregate in the original array can appear with multiples of a given element, and with the loss of other elements. Overall, the content of the array will still contain an even distribution of all twelve elements, but locally the flow of pitch classes will be varied. One of the consequences of this transformation can manifest itself in the sudden appearance of element duplication in the musical surface, articulated as unisons or octaves between those means by which Babbitt is projecting the array lines. A vivid moment of this latter operation may be heard at the midpoint of the Fourth String Quartet (1970), in which a unison A blossoms out in octave doublings in the passages that follow. Having established a practice based on all-partition arrays, Babbitt moved on to seeing how these themselves could be combined in ever more complex networks of polyphony, referred to as super-arrays. In the orchestra piece Ars Combinatoria (1981), Babbitt unfolds four transformations of the work’s array simultaneously, articulating once again a version of the list of the fifteen subsets of four, in this case not just of trichords, or individual instruments, but of complete twelve-part all-partition arrays, each presented by its own ensemble drawn from the orchestra as a whole.
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Much of the music that occupied him to the end of his career engaged with such counterpoints of counterpoint, at times piling up a dizzying number of simultaneously unfolding strands of music, as in, for instance, his Sixth String Quartet (1993). Yet, ideas and preferences found in his earliest work may still be perceived in the later music. The Head of the Bed (1982) returns to the ensemble of the Composition for Four Instruments, used here to accompany a soprano. The ensemble unfolds a super-array based on a frequently reused four-part all-partition array, while the voice part is composed using trichordal arrays disposed as they had been in the earlier work. The super-array is divisible into the fifteen subsets of four elements, here represented by how many of its constituent arrays are present and yielding the same collection of instrumental subgroups found in the earlier work, albeit in a different order. With relatively few exceptions, Babbitt’s catalogue of music displays an ever more complex exploration of the implications of some of his earliest decisions about how to treat pitch within the context of relations amongst aggregates. Register and instrumentation in various combinations form the basis for creating means of distinguishing amongst simultaneously unfolding strands of pitches, be they individual orderings of trichords, hexachords, or the total chromatic, or combinatorial pairs of rows, or complete arrays, or polyphonies of arrays. Babbitt’s treatment of rhythm, however, is a more varied affair. For Schoenberg, traditional ways of thinking about rhythm and metre can be quite easily derived from his roots in earlier practice. Recognisable dance rhythms, waltzes, and marches proliferate throughout his twelve-tone compositions, bringing with them their attendant associations both of affect and of accentuation within the bar. Babbitt, on the other hand, was not so much interested in re-enlivening traditional practice as he was committed to exploring the possibilities inherent in the radically different ways of construing relationships afforded by aggregate composition. His initial excursions into interpreting these new pitch relationships into the temporal domain dealt with issues of absolute duration, susceptible to the kinds of transformations he was using with pitch. The Composition for Four Instruments offers a good example of this, although he had worked with a similar structure in the second of the earlier Three Compositions for Piano. Figure 7.4 illustrates the durational pattern composed out in the ensemble work. While the Composition for Four Instruments employed a duration string of only four elements, subsequent works used duration strings derived
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Figure 7.4 Duration patterns in Composition for Four Instruments
from their underlying twelve-tone rows. The Second String Quartet (1954) is one of the more consequential pieces using this approach. But as may readily be imagined, this kind of translation of pitch to duration is not only a perceptual challenge but is non-commensurate with regard to things like interval preservation under various kinds of transformation. This caused
Milton Babbitt and ‘Total’ Serialism
Babbitt to seek another way of handling issues of time, one that would better afford parallelisms with his pitch procedures. Babbitt’s solution has been called the time-point system (see Babbitt 1962). At its heart is the use of metre to create a cyclical division of time. Just as the perception of octave equivalence allows a cyclical division of register, so in the time-point system the perception of a regular metre creates a series of ever-repeating cycles. If a bar, representing a single module, is divided into twelve attack points, one can construct a temporal analogy for the twelve-note equally tempered realm of pitch. Obviously, there are considerable differences, both abstract and perceptual, between the pitch and time domain, but by using time points as described here, Babbitt was able to make far closer analogies between pitch and rhythm than in his earlier practice (Mead 1987). Figure 7.5 illustrates some of the issues addressed above. One of the consequences of this approach is the restoration of a more traditional interpretation of rhythm and metre. While in some music of the twentieth century bar lines are reduced to serving as placeholders to help read a score or part, in many time-point compositions it is useful to be able
Figure 7.5 Time point rows and an aggregate realisation
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to recognise downbeats, pick-ups, subdivisions of various kinds, and so on. This is not to say that metrical interpretation is not active in earlier Babbitt; in fact, one of the interesting things about the Composition for Four Instruments is how tempo and the maintenance of the work’s absolute duration scheme interact to offer reinterpretations of large-scale repetitions of patterns. But with the advent of time-point composition, Babbitt’s music affords a whole range of engaging metrical interpretation. One example will serve to illustrate this. The Third and Fourth String Quartets were written within a year of each other but use complementary ways of altering tempo. In the case of the earlier work, a basic pulse present throughout the composition is frequently reinterpreted so that modular length can change from section to section. Some sections are notated in 38 , others in 3 or 6 , with the underlying eighth-note pulse always constant. Bar length, and 4 4 thus modular length, changes, and with it the sense of rate of turnover. In the case of the later quartet, the bar length is a constant throughout, but the notated tempo changes. The differences of temporal change between these two works is striking and is due to our way of hearing the modulus in each case. The use of the time-point system allowed Babbitt to create arrays of time-point rows, usually employing the same array structure found in the pitch domain. And just as the lynes of his pitch arrays are often distinguished by register, so Babbitt turned to dynamics to provide an analogue for projecting time points. Sometimes, this would lead him to use twelve different dynamic levels, but frequently he would use a single dynamic level to project a combinatorial pair of time-point rows, just as a single register might be used to unfold the analogous combinatorial pair of pitch-class rows in his arrays. This might at first seem to be a kind of false equivalency, but Babbitt was well aware of the inexactness of fit between structures in pitch and structures in time. This led him to adopt a greater degree of freedom in his exploration of the temporal domain over his career. Unlike the pitch domain, the temporal domain in Babbitt’s music demonstrates a number of different interpretations. Babbitt devised several different ways of treating time spans and added to these basic techniques a further way of subdividing the spans he created. In many works, a given timespan created by some means or other would be subdivided by some even number of attacks, not all of which would be sounded. The clue to these additional attacks may be heard in how they are realised as pitches. As mentioned above, pitch-class arrays are susceptible to interpretations based on the partial orderings determined by the lyne segments found in any given aggregate. Frequently, Babbitt would use this flexibility to create whole or
Milton Babbitt and ‘Total’ Serialism
partial cross-references to segments present elsewhere in the array. This was by no means his only approach to composing out the aggregates of his arrays, but it was one that appears frequently. The foregoing is at best an overview of Milton Babbitt’s developing approach to composing in the total chromatic and his use of various kinds of analogues to his thinking in pitch in his approach to handling rhythm. Much is left out; there are a number of pieces in which he moves in directions that he does not bring in to his central set of techniques. The underlying approach to constructing both rows and arrays in Philomel is never quite followed up in later work, and certain pieces such as The Crowded Air (1988) depart quite substantially from the technique of the music that surrounds it. Nor have I touched in any kind of comprehensive way on the variety of strategies Babbitt used to compose out the details of his arrays’ constituent aggregates. There is a danger of imagining that Babbitt’s composing was in some way algorithmic, that once an array had been selected for pitches and rhythms, and once the parameters for instrumental and registral projection had been determined, then the rest would follow trivially. But this could not be further from the case (see Mailman 2019). Babbitt’s compositional technique sets limits on the choices he could make in the process of writing, but it did not make those choices automatically. He once remarked that one the hardest things for him to do in starting a new piece was getting the previous piece out of his mind (personal conversation with the author). A more fruitful way of thinking about Babbitt’s compositional technique is to see it as the creation of a musical space within which he could be creative: the establishment of a set of constraints that allow any given compositional action to have consequences, to create contingencies, to induce echoes of itself that can spread through a work. Just as Schoenberg yearned for a compositional technique that would allow him to navigate the total chromatic in ways that could replicate the structural depth he perceived in the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Brahms, so Babbitt sought ways to explore the implications of Schoenberg’s insight into a fundamentally new way of construing notes, not as representations of scale degrees, but as means to individuate aggregates. Furthermore, while Babbitt’s compositional techniques grew over his career, their evolution was accretive in that ideas and approaches evident in his earliest published works persisted amidst all of his developments right up to his final compositions. And despite his work with the RCA Mark ii synthesizer, Babbitt’s conceptions of instruments and the voice had strong roots in
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traditional performance practice as a way of inflecting the idiosyncrasies of his musical imagination. In its own way, Babbitt’s musical practice echoes the balance between tradition and the avant-garde one finds in Schoenberg’s and Webern’s music. The difference, of course, lies not merely with the issue of compositional technique, but in what tradition each composer found himself. For Schoenberg and Webern, it was the legacy of nineteenth- and eighteenthcentury European practice. For Babbitt, it included a strong European heritage, but one heard from the vantage point of the New World, and it also included a very strong legacy of those Americanisms found in jazz and popular song (Maggart 2020; Brody 1993). Babbitt had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the American Songbook, with firm grounding in Jerome Kern and George Gershwin, and his youthful musical experience growing up in Jackson included not only playing clarinet in the local orchestra but playing in a variety of informal pick-up bands as well. Scholars have likened his approach to his own arrays as having an affinity to the revisiting of lead sheets in jazz as much as they are a new development from the first principles of twelve-tone composition (Mailman 2019). And while Babbitt’s music might seem a radical departure from earlier compositional practice, it is by many measures another instance of the American tendency to put together unexpected combinations of influences, just to see what happens.
8
Pierre Boulez and the Redefinition of Serialism catherine losada
Writing from Buenos Aires to John Cage in 1954, Pierre Boulez stated: I am keeping as much of my time as possible for writing Le Marteau sans maître . . . I am trying to go further and deeper, and also to widen my outlook. With the two a cappella choral pieces I wrote last year, it is one of the works that has given me the most trouble. I am trying to rid myself of my thumbprints and taboos; I am trying to have an ever more complex vision less visible and more worked out in depth I am trying to expand the series, and expand the serial principle to the maximum of its possibilities. (Nattiez 1993: 149)
The decade of the 1950s, in fact, witnessed a great transformation in the compositional practice of Pierre Boulez. The usual narratives of serialism during this decade have tended to dwell on Boulez’s experiments with multiple serialism in Structure Ia (1951), where the composer applied the operations common to twelve-tone music in a one-to-one mapping of other parameters such as duration, articulation, and dynamics. The practice of multiple serialism represented a significant contrast with the more conventional form of serialism that Boulez had successfully practised since 1945. It did, in fact, expand the serial principle by extending it to other parameters, thus breaking with familiar formal structures and opening up possibilities for common structural underpinnings between various parameters (Decroupet 1995a), but this experiment was tremendously short-lived. Boulez presented radical deviations from a straightforward application of multiple serialism as soon as the second and third movements of that work, Structures Ib and Ic (1952) (Boulez 2004). Although this technique appeared in other works, such as Polyphonie X (1951) and (briefly) Structures II (1956–61), it was eventually abandoned. The desire to expand the serial principle, however, did not end with it. The ensuing works, like Le Marteau sans maître (1952–5), Pli selon pli (1957–62/89), and the Third Piano Sonata (1955–7/63), which brought Boulez to the pinnacle of his reputation within the European circle of composers, are those that truly redefined serialism. Yet, with the exception of Le Marteau, which is often presented as an extension or loosening of serial practice, illustrating Boulez’s much cited references to a dialectic
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notes of the other set. Initially, Boulez incorporated this technique in the larger context of a multiplication table. These tables expand the series in a very literal sense. Each system of the table contains several embellished series, that is, partitions of the series transposed systematically by the intervals of the row itself and embellished by the intervals within the partitions themselves. Figure 8.2, from ‘Séquence’ (Third Piano Sonata), illustrates the multiplication table as an embellishment of the series most clearly (Decroupet 2006). The partitioned twelve-tone series appears at the top of the example. Each note of the row recurs at the top left of each of the twelve sequences of six chords that make up the pre-compositional sketch. Each of these sequences of chords consists of the partitioned row transposed to start on successive notes of the row and embellished (depending on which of the six systems it is on), by the intervals within each of the six partitions. For instance, in the last system of the table, the partitioned row is transposed to start on E♭ and C♯ (the notes of the last of the partition of the row, taken in order from top to bottom). Each of these transposed rows is embellished by a transposition of the same at the interval between E♭ and C♯ (two semitones down). Similar tables were used for works such as
Figure 8.2 Annotated reproduction of pre compositional table for ‘Séquence’, from Third Piano Sonata. Paul Sacher Foundation, Pierre Boulez Collection (Mappe H, Dossier 2 f,1)
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Structures II (1956–61), Doubles (1958), and Domaines (1961–68) (Koblyakov 1990: 32; Losada 2014; Losada 2017; Losada 2019a; Losada 2019b). This practice creates an identity between the relationships governing local and large-scale structures, a criterion that had been important for Boulez throughout his career (Boulez 1991e: 116–17; cf. Piencikowski 1985 and 1993; Decroupet 2012 and 2016; Losada 2008, 2014, 2017 2019a, 2019b, 2019c). Figure 8.3 presents a graph that illustrates how the desire to preserve the same structure on the local and larger level explains the transpositional structure of the multiplication table as a whole. The graph in Figure 8.3a reflects the relationships embedded in the partitioned row (Figure 8.3b), stressing the transpositional relationships between the highest notes in each partition of the row, which function as anchor notes. If the nodes of the graph are filled with pitch classes, the graph represents the partitioned row (moving clockwise from the very top node, which represents the first partition of the row). If they are filled with each of the sets of the partitioned row, the graph represents a vertical or horizontal trajectory through each of the columns or systems of the multiplication table. Finally, if the nodes are filled with the partitioned row itself, the graph represents the entire left side of the multiplication table. This explains the transpositional structure of the table, which is determined by the intervals between the anchor notes. Simultaneously, each of the shaded radial subgraphs in Figure 8.3a, which reflect the intervals embedded in each of the partitions of the row, represents the transpositional relationships that govern the corresponding system of the table. Crucially, this type of structural organisation creates important harmonic relationships, defined by common tones, common subsets, and varying degrees of chromatic saturation, which embody a hierarchical organisation. The multiplication table also expands the series in terms of density, thus permitting a degree of flexibility at the local level, where the pitch classes can be disposed of with a certain freedom and are not subject to a strict temporal disposition. Furthermore, in several of these works, multiplication tables organise parameters beyond pitch (especially duration). This practice has several advantages over the former approach to multiple serialism when applied to other dimensions. Chief amongst these advantages is the organisation into groups, which enables the composer to avoid the pointillistic sound world that emerges from having each note associated with its own dynamic, articulation, and duration marking.
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to compose without sketches, which would be very pleasant!! The sketches would be made in the course of the work and not before. I intend to integrate that into the variation principles (generative principles) which would themselves be submitted to a vertical and horizontal serial universe. (Letter from Boulez to Stockhausen, quoted in Piencikowski 2016: 99)
After the composition of Le Marteau, Boulez did in fact, gradually reduce his reliance on extensive pre-compositional tables of the type shown in Figure 8.2. Two crucial influences led to radical changes in his compositional approach, what I term the redefinition of serialism (Piencikowski 2016; cf. Salem 2016). These were the influence of mathematical trains of thought on his techniques of composition and the influence of music from other cultures on his approach to temporality, timbre, and texture. I will examine each of the influences in turn. A turning point in Boulez’s career was his exposure to the logical empiricism of Louis Rougier (Rougier 1956; cf. Decroupet 2003a; Nicolas 2005 and 2010; Campbell 2010; Losada 2019c), which had repercussions on his musical technique that allowed him to reach many of the goals outlined in the quotation cited immediately above. In his writings, Rougier argues that that the fundamental axioms of a system, instead of apodictic or assertoric truths, in certain cases may simply be optional conventions (Rougier 1920: 199; Marion 2005: 158–59; cf. Losada 2019c). He states, furthermore, that ‘a reasoning should be independent of the object upon which one reasons . . . Only the relations imposed upon these notions by the postulates and the definitions must intervene in the deduction’ (Rougier 1920: 199). Crucially, ‘the axiomatic method makes it possible to construct purely formal theories which are networks of relations, schemes of ready-made deductions. Consequently, the same form can be applied to various subjects, to sets of objects of a different nature, on the sole condition that these objects respect among themselves the same relations as those stated between the undefined symbols of the theory’ (Rougier 1956: 1001). Rougier’s ideas transformed Boulez’s approach to serialism by providing him with the motivation to expand the serial principle in two fundamental, and radical, ways. In the first place, they made Boulez increasingly less reliant on a generative twelve-tone row and extensive pre-compositional sketches and more prone to reappropriate previously used materials as the basis for new works. On the other hand, they led to solidification of a practice already common to Boulez: that of applying networks of relationships, chosen from the possibilities embedded in the source material, in different contexts. This had important consequences for his harmonic language.
Pierre Boulez and the Redefinition of Serialism
embellished by additional notes, thus permitting continuity in the musical language in a non-dodecaphonic context (Losada 2021). These are the technical underpinnings of Boulez’s redefinition of serialism. They allowed Boulez to realise the goal of composing without extensive pre-compositional sketches, instead creating the sketches along the way. Although hierarchy is essential to his conception, it is not determined in advance: it is achieved through variation principles (generative principles) that work in both the horizontal and vertical realm. His satisfaction with the potential of these techniques can be seen in the following comment in a letter to Stockhausen from late 1957: ‘now that we have a basic technique that is sufficiently broad and solid, we must work madly on the poetics’ (Karlheinz Stockhausen Collection, Paul Sacher Stiftung). This outlook explains why Boulez essentially stops writing theoretical texts on music for about a decade after 1965 (Goldman 2011: 39). Having solidified his compositional technique, Boulez was ready to focus on the aesthetic realm. This aesthetic component accompanied the transformation of this compositional approach and had far-reaching influence in several fields of inquiry. It derived from a multitude of influences, many of which, like the ideas of John Cage, affected most mainstream European composers of the time. I would like to focus, however, on those that were important to Boulez as an individual. These are encapsulated in the concept of the ‘rhizome’ and the influence of music from other cultures. The rhizome relates to the creative alternative to organicism embedded in Rougier’s logical empiricism (see Losada 2019a). Rougier states that ‘there exist an unlimited number of equivalent notions and propositions that can be chosen as primaries, without any being imposed by right of nature’ (Rougier 1956: 1001). As has been noted by many authors, Boulez’s works from this time period can be grouped into families of works that share common materials. The nature of the relationship between the different works, however, varies widely. While some works share common materials with others without any audible link between them (for example, the Third Piano Sonata and Domaines, which are based on pre-compositional tables derived from retrograde inversional related rows), others have clear musical links. Some works are re-compositions or revisions of others (for example, Figures Doubles Prismes (1963/8) compared to Doubles (1958)), while others constitute expansions of movements, smaller sections, or materials from another work (for example, Domaines for clarinet and instrumental ensemble compared to Domaines for solo clarinet, or Éclat, with respect to the first version of Don, for voice and piano). In Boulez’s practice, from here on, even works that share a common pre-compositional basis typically exploit
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different properties embedded in the materials themselves, creating a multidirectional (non-organic) network of relationships between different works and sections within individual works. This approach, embedded in the concept of the rhizome, was far-reaching in its influence. It appears in Boulez’s sketches from the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was adopted and developed by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the 1970s (Campbell 2010: 143–5), indicating that they may have taken this idea from Boulez. As Luisa Bassetto and Rosângela Pereira de Tugny have stated, the music of other cultures was another crucial aesthetic influence on Boulez, transforming his approach to texture, timbre, and timing, in addition to the question of what constitutes the work itself (Bassetto 2003 and 2014; Pereira de Tugny 1998 and 2006). This influence was not superficial, nor did it consist of a straightforward appropriation or imitation. As I argue in a recent article (Losada 2021), Boulez’s interactions with the ‘other’ illustrate Gianmario Borio’s penetrating assessment of how artists like Boulez were forerunners of post-colonial thinking (Borio 2009; Borio 2013a). In Boulez’s music, elements inspired by music from other cultures impress themselves indelibly into the creative procedures and are fundamental to his redefinition of serialism. In my view, this interaction is an example of ‘productive reception’ in the sense presented by Maria Moog-Grünewald (Moog-Grünewald 1993) and shows elements of ‘critical listening positionality’ described by Dylan Robinson (Robinson 2020), though it is important to note that Robinson (and others) would probably consider this extraction to be problematic. From my standpoint, however, as a person whose identity can only be described as resulting from the confluence of many different cultures, these interactions between different cultures do not seem problematic when they invert established schemes of dominance and invoke a change in the way we listen to and conceive of the work of art, reflecting a deep understanding of the musical and cultural contexts. Boulez, highly critical of composers writing music primarily based on exoticism, sets his approach in relief, by emphasising what he admired about Debussy, and specifically how Debussy permitted elements from the music of other cultures to transform his musical language without imitating or making direct reference (and thus exploiting) the original context (Boulez 1967: 6; Boulez 1984: 142–3; Boulez 1991i). Boulez also clarifies how he uses instruments from other cultures in order to destabilise dominant hierarches (Boulez 1984: 140). In order to grasp the depth and quality of this influence on the music of Boulez, it is important to understand some crucial aspects of the composer’s professional trajectory (cf. Losada 2021b). In 1946, after completing
Pierre Boulez and the Redefinition of Serialism
his studies with Messiaen in the Paris conservatory, and having started to achieve recognition through some of his compositions, like the Sonatina, Boulez expressed an interest in being an ethnomusicologist (Bassetto 2014). In fact, he planned a research trip to Cambodia, with the Guimet Museum, but this trip was never realised owing to the start of the IndoChina War. However, Boulez realised many transcriptions of music from the Far East and Africa during this time. Boulez acknowledged the influence of the music from other cultures on his approach to temporality. This is manifest in the way texture and timbre interact with timing to create an exploration of musical space. In the first place, it affected his sense of timing within the works, imbuing them with a greater degree of flexibility. On the other hand, it affected his conception of what constitutes a work of art in itself. Both of these ideas, and the acknowledgement of the influences from the Far East, are embedded in the following quote from Boulez: Regarding the time conception and the cyclic works which apparently have neither beginning nor end in India and Japan a performance lasts a very long time, people come and go, listen or not as they please I would say that on the creative level I live in a kind of plasma which enables me to change my location by moving from front to rear. I remain in the same material and project my thoughts in several directions at once. I now have a flexible material that permits these shifts in time and these diversions. Because of this I have made several versions of Pli selon pli and am thinking of extending Éclat. (Boulez 1967: 8)
In the realm of timbre, Boulez mentions that the xylorimba refers to the African balafon, the vibraphone to the Balinese gamelan, and the guitar to the koto from Japan (Boulez 1986d: 341). Following Boulez’s lead, many scholars have commented particularly on the influence of the music from the Far East (Griffiths 1978: 28; Bradshaw 1986: 159; Decroupet 2005: 44). Far fewer have commented on another crucial influence on Boulez, that related to his experiences in Latin America. The same year as Boulez’s failed research trip to Cambodia, he was appointed music director of the Compagnie Renaud Barrault. Although Boulez did not travel to Africa or the Far East during this formative period, his position with the Compagnie Renaud Barrault allowed him to realise three extended tours of Latin America. These were in 1950, 1954, and 1956 (Bassetto 2003; Campbell 2016). These Latin American tours proved to be crucial to Boulez’s development as a composer, partly because of the pieces that he was working on during that time. Edward Campbell has provided crucial information
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regarding these trips, which makes it possible to see the extent of the importance of this experience (Campbell 2016; Salem 2018). During the tour of 1950, Boulez worked on an abandoned project, a setting of Mallarmé’s ‘Un coup de dés’. During the Latin American tours of 1954 and 1956 respectively, however, Boulez worked on two pieces that carried him to very centre of the circle of European composers. As mentioned above (p. 125), during the tour of 1954 he worked on Le Marteau, specifically, on the ‘Commentaire III de “Bourreaux de solitude”’. During the tour of 1956 he worked on the Third Sonata. A few concrete influences can be attributed to these experiences. Campbell has noted how, in his 1954 tour, Boulez met with the brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, founders of concrete poetry, in São Paulo. They spoke of Pound, Joyce, Cummings, and Mallarmé’s ‘Un coup de dés’ (Boulez to Souvtchinsky, quoted in Campbell 2016: 11). Given this, it is interesting to note, as Campbell does, the relationship between Augusto de Campos’s poems from 1953 and 1954 (for example, ‘dias, dias, dias’), which explore the idea of alternative trajectories distinguished by colours, and the score for Boulez’s Third Sonata, a work which was first conceived, according to a letter from Boulez to Stockhausen, around December 1954 (Losada 2018). This throws interesting light on the debate about lines of influence between European composers regarding ‘open’ elements in composition (O’Hagan 2017: 187). The open work, which refers both to works that lack a specific predefined trajectory, incorporating elements of choice, and to works that are subjected to perpetual recomposition and revision to the point that many remained as works in progress to the end of the composer’s life, became an essential feature of Boulez’s compositional approach for the remainder of his career. Musical influences, principally affecting temporality and timbre, were important as well (O’Hagan 2007) but were always integrated into the musical language, transforming it from within, rather than invoking or imitating an extraneous context (see Losada 2021). As stated above (p. 135), Boulez explains the incorporation of instruments from other cultures as a means to destabilise dominant hierarchies, which is made possible by the profound incompatibility in the aesthetic contexts (Boulez 1984: 140). The movement Boulez was working on during his South American tour of 1954, the ‘III Commentaire’, incorporates clear timbral influences. The beginning of the work shines with the bright, propelling rhythm of the claves, while the end is characterised by timelessness in the repetitions of the bongos and maracas attacking simultaneously
Pierre Boulez and the Redefinition of Serialism
(this texture is reminiscent of the method of playing the birimbao). In an interview with Peter O’Hagan, Boulez acknowledged other influences, like the timbral contrast between harp and flute of the music of Peru, which is essential to the timbral and spatial worlds of the ‘Improvisations sur Mallarmé’ in Pli selon pli (quoted in Campbell 2016: 23; cf. Bassetto 2003). In spite of acknowledging the influence of the Latin American music in matters of texture and rhythm in this interview with Peter O’Hagan, in other places Boulez disclaims any musical influence from Latin America, claiming that the influence was spiritual and not musical (Boulez 1967: 4). This most likely reflects the fact that the musical influences were not in the realm of pitch, nor were intended as imitation, but instead transcended into other dimensions, such as texture and temporality, which, in fact, had a more profound influence on future trends, as I will discuss in the conclusion to this essay (pp. 138–9). For example, in the interview with O’Hagan, he acknowledges the influence of the contrast between percussion and voice of the candomblé. This can be linked to the contrast between smooth and striated time that underlies much of his music from this time (including the examples from Le Marteau and Pli selon pli above), as well as his development of the concept of resonance, perhaps best represented in the play between resonant and non-resonant instruments that is basic to his conception of Éclat, which reaches beyond extending the dimension of time into that of musical space. Campbell provides important information showing how the Latin American tours were essential to Boulez’s conducting career, since they gave him a first opportunity to conduct a symphony orchestra in a comparatively safe context, which boosted his confidence (Campbell 2016: 21– 2). The strides he made in the transformation of his compositional process during the same time period, indicate that the Latin American tours were essential to his development as a composer, giving him the distance and perspective necessary to truly explore new realms and break boundaries and to allow influences from the music of other cultures to re-emerge in his compositions. As Boulez wrote to Souvtchinsky on a 1956 postcard containing an image of one of the Inca ruins in Peru: Look at this post card. It will show you the rhythm of my breath when I am alone! I am here for two days completely by myself, face to face with this. I am oxygenating myself for the future. And all previous connections will fall. The sanctuary of these places has alleviated my anxiety, and strengthened my resolution. We shall speak of it in Paris. (Boulez to Souvtchinsky, quoted in Campbell 2016: 20 (translation modified); cf. Losada 2021b)
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To summarise, Boulez’s redefinition of serialism consisted of developing a palette of developmental techniques that could be applied simultaneously to the horizontal and vertical dimensions and at a compositional, rather than a pre-compositional stage, which imbued them with an unprecedented degree of flexibility, as they could proliferate while the composer worked on individual passages. This perspective sees the development of newer trends in Boulez’s music, not as an extension, or loosening, of the serial practice, but as developments that were made possible by his redefinition of serialism. The mathematical premises underlying his focus on techniques that developed relationships built into the material itself, resonate with those embedded in transformational theory. For this reason, the music is ideally suited to analytical techniques that invoke that theory, as embodied in the work of David Lewin (Lewin 1987; Lewin 1993). Its structure results from anchor notes and important common tone relationships that provide the basis for larger-scale harmonic structures and allowed Boulez to explore the so-called diagonal dimension, allowing for the flexibility in the treatment of musical time. Such flexibility in the compositional approach enabled an opening up of the aesthetic realm that had important repercussions in the development of future trends. Many of Boulez’s works from this time (for instance, Éclat) were groundbreaking in their exploration of time and space informed by the concept of resonance. The major transformation of his compositional techniques during this time period, with their harmonic structures characterised by large, common subsets embellished by additional notes, can also be seen as resulting from a broader exploration of the concept of resonance, which provides the primary inspiration for all the timbral references described above (Losada 2021). Such focus was behind Boulez’s farreaching influence on a younger generation of composers, particularly through his work at IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique). He had a crucial influence on subsequent developments in composition in fields. The influence of such aesthetic issues (exploration of time and space) on electronic music is straightforward enough. Scholars have also commented on the relationship between Boulez’s blocks of sounds and early experiments in the electronic studio (Piencikowski 2002; Decroupet 1995a). By understanding the importance of the concept of resonance to Boulez’s later works, one can also make a case of his influence on the aesthetics of spectralism, which developed at IRCAM in the 1970s. In fact, spectral composer Tristan Murail describes spectral music as an aesthetic concerned with ‘sound evolving in time’ (Fineberg 2000: 2; cf. Murail 2005).
Pierre Boulez and the Redefinition of Serialism
Beyond the aesthetic realm, technical influences are important as well. The serial developmental techniques underlie the relationship between acoustic and electronic components in Boulez’s most influential electronic works. For instance, in Répons, a work which propelled him again to the very forefront of composers, Boulez translates his most important serial techniques to the electronic manipulations that are embedded in the work (Gerzso 1984). In these precise technical connections the root of Boulez’s motivation for founding IRCAM can be seen, a cooperation between scientists and artists to create a technology that can give voice to the artist’s technical and expressive ideas. Similarly, Boulez’s exploration of sound structures through repeated proliferation of his techniques of development in the vertical realm (for instance in the Third Sonata (O’Hagan 1997 and 2017) and Doubles (Losada 2018 and 2019b)), along with his aesthetic position that explored the boundaries between perception and nonperception, prefigured crucial developments in compositional trends that explored the boundaries between sound and noise essential to sound mass composers such as Penderecki and Ligeti (Boulez 1976: 51–2; cf. Losada 2014, 2017, 2019a, and 2019b; Decroupet 2006). This discussion shows how, far from an abandoned practice, Boulez’s expansion and redefinition of serialism resulted in works and approaches that opened up new avenues for composition and continue to be relevant to composers worldwide to this day.
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The Serial Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen imke misch
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Karlheinz Stockhausen was one of the first European composers to write serial music (or – to distinguish it from the dodecaphony of, for instance, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern – multiple serial music). He is also one of its most high-profile representatives: for Stockhausen, serial thinking was a complex and life-long ‘mental attitude’ which went beyond composing (Stockhausen 1963i: 48; Stockhausen 2014c). With the start of serial composing in the early 1950s up until the end of his life, Stockhausen played a role in countless compositional, technical, and aesthetic innovations, something which is also reflected by a range of new terms applied to his musical works. Such terms include point music, group composition, statistical field composition, moment form, process composition, variable music, formula composition, scenic and multi-formula music, and more. In a nutshell, it can even be said that Stockhausen’s entire work is marked by serial thinking, even if some phases – such as his ‘intuitive music’ – seem distinct at first glance. The chronological cornerstones of his serial work comprise the ensemble piece Kreuzspiel (1951) and the Klang cycle – The 24 Hours of the Day – which came about between 2004 and 2007. Below follows a necessarily brief walk through the work, which stops at selected points, which will serve to explain the foundations and the constants, but also the creatively changeable dimensions of Stockhausen’s serial thinking. In summer 1951, Stockhausen participated in the Darmstadt New Music Courses for the first time. He met the Belgian Karel Goeyvaerts (cf. Delaere 2010 and 2011; Misch and Delaere 2017), who had the first (multiple) serial composition in Europe under his belt with his Sonata for Two Pianos, which he had just completed. Goeyvaerts studied at the Paris Conservatory until 1950, where he became familiar with Olivier Messiaen’s ‘Mode de valeurs et d’intensités’, which inspired him to create the sonata. In Darmstadt back in those years, there was much being said about the twelvetone music of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. With the ‘Mode’, Messiaen went one step further than the composers of the Vienna School, who had only arranged pitches in rows: he organised the parameters of pitch, duration, volume, and attack intensity in the form of ‘modes’. Goeyvaerts took the step towards complete serial design in
The Serial Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen
the second movement of his sonata. Fascinated by the novelty of this music, following the 1951 Darmstadt Courses Stockhausen composed Kreuzspiel for oboe, bass clarinet, piano, and three percussionists, his first own comprehensive serial composition. In the run-up to 1953, other works of this type followed in close succession: Spiel for orchestra (1952), Schlagquartett (1952, revised in the same year as Schlagtrio for piano and two timpanists), Klavierstücke I–IV (1952–3), Punkte (1952/62) and Kontra-Punkte (1952–3), as well as the electronic Studie I (1953) and II (1954). Stockhausen soon described these works as ‘point music’, a term Herbert Eimert had coined in 1952, to describe the auditory impression of isolated successive tones. At the same time, Stockhausen wrote his first theoretical essays, in which he attempted to explain and clarify the new type of composition. Basic aspects of his serial thinking were distinct even in Kreuzspiel, in that the serial organisation of a composition always represents a complex and procedural structural principle which arose from a superordinate work idea. From individual elements to large shapes, everything musical in the work is there to be seen, and with this the entire serial organisation is in a coherent context. In Kreuzspiel, for example – as the title indicates – it is about the ‘idea of a crossing of temporal and spatial processes . . . in 3 stages’ (Stockhausen 1964c: 11). Stockhausen selected a twelve-tone series as the basis of the regulations to be applied to the material, which he linked with two groups of six different dynamics, twelve intervals, and twelve durations (Blumröder 1993: 39–56). With this, though, following additional serial predeterminations with regard to the musical material, at the stage when the music would be played the matter was not one of initial exposure of the initial series with subsequent derivations or permutations; rather, it was about the procedural emergence and passing of the initial series, whereby it undergoes an ‘inner change’ (Blumröder 1993: 56). On a more general level, in his essay on the ‘Criteria of Point Music’, Stockhausen speaks of the ‘subordination of tones to a unified principle’, hence idea of the work. Important factors here include the ‘singularity’ of the work idea, and ‘lack of contradiction’ between the idea and the material regulations and the equality of all individual parts. The ‘single element’, in turn, is ‘the tone with its four dimensions: duration, intensity, pitch, colour’ (Stockhausen 1963e: 18–19). As a matter of fact, in the case of ‘point’ compositions, an individual sound is the largest unit. This is because the determinative procedure aims to tie together different sets of characteristics that emerge at the interfaces of individually characterised single tones. In contrast to earlier composition methods, the individual tone acquires
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a completely new status in that it carries within the idea of the whole thing – by which it was generated – as a structural moment. In his ‘Work Report’ (on work undertaken between 1952 and 1953), Stockhausen formulated this as a premise of point composition: ‘To begin with, all form should set out from the point from the individual tone – and flow back into it’ (Stockhausen 1963a: 36). This new type of concentration on the individual tone as the ‘largest formal unit’ can also be explained by the demand for ‘unification’ and ‘lack of contradiction’ within the superordinate structural principle, since the functional tonality of the tones is no longer determined by that which goes before and after them (Stockhausen 1963f: 76). With this, an additional aspect comes into play: the expansion of serial composition to all sound parameters meant a radical abandonment of previously regulative techniques of musical organisation. Stockhausen was well aware of this fracture: following the period of the Nazi dictatorship and the Second World War, he intended to preside over a rebirth of music with serial composing. In 1953, he emphatically wrote in the essay ‘On the Situation of the Métier’: ‘It should not be forgotten, however, that seldom has a generation of composers had so many opportunities and been born at such a fortunate point in time: The “cities are erased” and we can start from scratch again irrespective of ruins and “tasteless” remains’ (Stockhausen 1963i: 48). For Stockhausen, serial composing was a ‘new musical language’, which, after the ‘derailment of German Romanticism’ (Stockhausen 1963i: 48), opened up the possibility of overcoming subjective and national tendencies: Around 1950 a new generation began the formulation of a new musical language which contained all the basic premises to allow the creation of a new, collectively supranational and largely supra personal language. Terms such as ‘point music’ and ‘serial music’ were chosen to describe it, and if the term ‘European’ hadn’t gone to the dogs economically and politically, one might indeed talk of a ‘European music’. (Stockhausen 1964f)
Like other composers, Stockhausen appealed to Anton Webern in particular: it was in Webern’s twelve-tone works that he saw an expanded compositional predetermination, if still bound to the idea of the series, most strongly mapped out. Stockhausen also analysed Webern’s music from a serial perspective: in the Concerto for nine instruments op. 24, ‘some once-chosen Gestalt (theme, motive)’, in Stockhausen’s eyes, was no longer essential. What was essential was ‘rather the proportional sequence chosen for pitches, note values and dynamic levels’. The ‘Schoenbergian thematic serial principle’ was replaced by a procedure whereby a certain
The Serial Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen
number of parameters – in a constantly changing combination – served as a sort of ‘structural mediation’ (Stockhausen 1963g: 26). While Stockhausen felt a ‘contradiction’ between the use of twelve-tone series and the recourse to traditional principles of sentence formation and form design in the case of Schoenberg, Webern’s music offered him a starting point which he viewed as legitimate from the perspective of musical history. With the first serial point compositions, traditional ‘“Gestalts” – themes, motives, objects’ have been replaced by ‘a series of the most latent and striking transformations and renewals’. ‘The same thing is never heard twice’, Stockhausen insisted. ‘Yet we have the distinct feeling that we do not fall out of an unmistakable, extremely unified construction. A hidden cohesive force, related proportions: a structure. Not the same Gestalts in a changing light, but instead: various Gestalts in the same light that permeates everything’ (Stockhausen 1963a: 37). In the early 1950s, Stockhausen consequently understood the serial organisation of material as ‘a sort of support that keeps us from slipping’. To him, in its strictest form, it was necessary to retain this support until one was able to speak the new musical language ‘without mincing matters’ (Stockhausen 1963i: 48). However, in all Stockhausen’s work, he never viewed his serial organisational forms as a rigid grid. Flexible handling of pre-established organisational structures is most clearly evident in the numerous ‘inserts’ in his works (cf. Assis 2016). At the end of the 1970s, Stockhausen confessed that he had initially composed his works in one go before considering them ‘finished’, but then, occasionally, ‘almost in a state of fear that the whole thing was too theoretical’, withdrew to consider ‘sound ideas’ which were ‘not accommodated in the system’ (Stockhausen 1989c: 323). In Gruppen for three orchestras, for example, in the highly complex four-part serial work structure, three longer free musical sections were inserted (cf. Misch 1999b). Only with this alternating combination does the work gain its specific dramaturgical element, something which is possible only because of the temporary rejection of serial strictness. Elsewhere, what this means is that ‘inserts are always what are left out during the planning stage. They are not just events; they are always the events which are missing. . . . Inserts are the necessary additions in an organism’ (Stockhausen 2014j: 311). Stockhausen’s hint that he always composed the large form of a work ‘intuitively and the microstructure mentally’ (Stockhausen 1978b: 577) complements this description of the relationship between serial order and compositional freedom. Although early serial composing was based on the model of twelve-tone music, and the starting point was often a series of pitches, from the start
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composers acknowledged the challenge of finding comparable and above all practical forms of organisation for the other parameters: length, volume, timbre, and so on. Simply dividing these parameters, like pitch, into twelve equal parts led to unsatisfactory results, since an addition of rhythmic values does not correspond to the logarithmic principle of twelve tempered halftones within an octave. With Kreuzspiel, Stockhausen limited the dynamics to six values, which he used twice. In Klavierstück III, the ‘specific organisation of the material, and as such the entire composition’ are based on the principle of a serial order each element of which comprised three determinants (Blumröder 1993: 123). These include, for example, three dynamic values (piano, mezzo forte, and forte), three metric units of three, four, and five eighth values expanded into a series by multiplication, and a pitch organisation based on two sets of three fourtone groups and two three-tone groups, alongside permutations in units of three and so on (cf. Blumröder 1993: 123–37). The serial organisation of Kontra-Punkte for ten instruments, on the other hand, is based on units of six. Stockhausen initially formed, for example, six different timbres: ‘3 different types of pairs of wind instruments and 3 string instruments with strings which are struck, plucked and stroked’. In the course of the work there unfolds a process which begins ‘in a diverse world of sound’, in which all timbres are to be heard; gradually the timbres are subtly reduced, until only ‘a unified, unchanged output can be heard’, the struck strings of the piano (Stockhausen 1964h: 20). In 1953, with Studie I, Stockhausen composed the first piece of electronic music comprised solely of sine tones. Until this point, the parameter of timbre had been something that was not serially determined in compositions for traditional musical instruments, and this allowed electronic media to create completely new and work-specific timbres. What served as a starting point for Studie I was a sequence of five proportions which resembled a falling minor tenth (12:5), rising major third (4:5), falling minor sixth (8:5), rising minor tenth (5:12), and falling major third (5:4). A frequency selected at the beginning was multiplied with the factors of these proportions (Stockhausen 1964b: 24), so that further permutations for a sufficiently large number of frequencies could then be derived from the resulting frequency series. With the help of a permutation procedure based on a series of six, sound mixtures were then formed from the frequencies. The principle of ‘mixing sound mixtures from simple tones’ generates the ‘mould construction’ of the entire composition: ‘Sounds form sound mixtures (“Sound groups” – vertical); sound mixtures form sequences (“sound groups” – horizontal); sequences form structures (“sequence
The Serial Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen
groups” – horizontal or vertical); meaning that a uniform proportion of the whole work can be determined from a group series’ (Stockhausen 1964b: 26; Stockhausen’s italics). As is shown based on these short work contexts, the term ‘series’ rapidly undergoes a modification with the advent of Stockhausen’s serial composing. It no longer refers only to pitches, durations, volumes, and timbres; rather, it refers to the sequences of numbers and proportions which generate the structure of the entire composition. In 1953, Stockhausen’s overall definition of the ‘serial principle’ is: that for a given composition a limited set of different magnitudes is chosen; that these magnitudes are proportionally related; that they are arranged in a definite succes sion and in definite intervals; that this serial selection is made for all elements of the composition; that from these ‘basic series’ further series of superordinate Gestalts are composed that are themselves serially varied; and that the proportions of the series constitute the comprehensive structural principle of the work to be composed and lend it the necessary formal consistency. (Stockhausen 1964b: 26)
One key work that fully implements this principle is Gruppen. The core of the work is one half of a symmetrical all-interval series, from which the entire work structure was derived, as if from a genetic code. As in Studie I, Stockhausen used mainly the interval proportions of this series: he transferred them in consistent ratios and in this way generated a structural space–time continuum (cf. Stockhausen 1963h; Misch 1998 and 1999b). This also solved two fundamental problems. For one, there existed a convincing classification system for the time level comparable to the pitches, with which Stockhausen worked from a permanent octave, which – like the pitch octave – is divided in logarithmic intervals and is transposable. Also, the new organisational system generated larger formal units. The details of these longer musical sections were handled by Stockhausen partially in accordance with statistical criteria – only the framework conditions were determined by the superordinate plan. The single tone was no longer the largest unit to be formed; rather, it was a socalled group of tones. The dominant experiential qualities of these group continued to be determined serially: ‘Soon, however, I broadened the exclusively “point” conception of form. I hit upon group composition. In group series, pitches are grouped together according to mutual superordinate characteristics. And yet the individual pitches, which are to be heard grouped together, are still the point of departure’ (Stockhausen 1963f: 76). At the start of the 1950s, Stockhausen had postulated a system of strict handling of the row-bound organisational forms, for the purpose of
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avoiding echoes of the previously regulative musical language. During the 1950s, he gradually loosened his self-imposed strictness; however, he did it without abandoning the essential principles behind his serial thinking. One consequence on a technical level was the development of group composition. However, the complexity of serial notation influenced not only audio perception but also musical interpretation. After all, an extreme differentiation in the rhythmic area brings with it ‘factors of uncertainty’, which influence ‘temporal precision . . . in performance’ (Stockhausen 1963h: 126). In order to ensure creative use of this inaccuracy, Stockhausen responded with statistical determinations of musical properties, and introduced the term ‘field’ into his terminology: ‘series of field sizes’ and ‘field proportions’ operate in ‘statistical field composition’; the abrupt ‘shift from “point” to “statistical” temporal perception’ was ‘yet a further motive for statistical field composition’ (Stockhausen 1963h: 129). ‘The statistical conception of form works with approximative determinations. It deals with degrees of density of note groups; degrees of pitch register, of direction of motion; degrees of velocity, of change of velocity, of average intensity, of change in intensity; degrees of timbre and of timbral mutation’, Stockhausen stated (Stockhausen 1963f: 77). Aleatoricism, polyvalence, and variability are effective both at micro and macro levels in many of Stockhausen’s compositions. In Zeitmasze for five woodwinds (1955–6), there exist five different ‘pace settings’ (the time measurements of the title) which combine precise time determination with flexible time design – ‘played sequentially and simultaneously’: ‘1. twelve tempos on a chromatic scale between single and double speed (bb. 60–120), measured according to clock time; 2. As fast as possible; 3. Start extremely quickly and slow down approx. four times; 4. Start at a speed approx. four times slower until ‘as fast as possible’; 5. As slow as possible’ (Stockhausen 1964g: 46; cf. Kohl 2017). For the electronic composition Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–6), Stockhausen had a boy sing verses from the Apocrypha to the book of Daniel. Even though he introduced the creation of unknown, never-beforeheard timbres into electronic music, this was when the human voice was, for the first time, included in the context of the new medium. The sung recordings were subjected to an extensive serial design process, which operated with, for instance, a series of seven intelligibility levels (cf. Stockhausen 1964i, 1964a, and 1964e; Decroupet and Ungeheuer 1998; Heike 1999; Toop 1981). There is also a mediation between electronically generated sounds and sung speech sounds, music and speech, sinus tone complexes and sung chords, and so on. Much is serially scaled and formed,
The Serial Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen
while other things are designed according to statistical criteria. In Gesang der Jünglinge, space is also used as a musical parameter for the first time in Stockhausen’s output: in the four-channel (originally, five-channel) composition, the sound results are distributed across the four tracks of the recording and over the four loudspeakers during performance in a concert hall, according to serial criteria. In this way, the work constitutes the prelude to a series of other Stockhausen pieces which are composed as space music (cf. Stockhausen 1963d; Misch 1999a). Stockhausen designated the location at or from which sound is generated a “topic” (Stockhausen 1963d: 152–75), which is to say an additional new parameter in addition to pitch, volume and timbre. The spatial dimensions were gradually expanded, a function not least of the available technical possibilities: Telemusik (1966), Kontakte (1958–60), and Hymnen (1966–7) are four-track; Sirius (1975–7) is eight-track; in the opera cycle Licht (1977–2003), there is a cubic loudspeaker model in Oktophonie from Dienstag aus Licht; the electronic music with sound scenes from Freitag aus Licht is twelve-track. The pinnacle of spatial polyphony is represented by Cosmic Pulses, the thirteenth hour of Klang (2004–7): Stockhausen composed twenty-four sound layers, each of which has its own tempo, overlapping with the others in the piece and, then, a total of 241 different ‘space orbits’ (Stockhausen 2014b: 65), distributed over eight speakers, for the individual sections of these sound layers. If the large-scale layout of a composition is variable, then Stockhausen would also speak of ‘polyvalent form’ in such cases (cf. Stockhausen 1963b: 241). Klavierstück XI (1956) is probably the best-known example. This is composed of nineteen musical sections which are irregularly distributed on the score sheet. The interpreter can start with any group and also connect the following sections together ‘unintentionally’ (Stockhausen 1964j: 69). The sound groups are serially composed in detail and precisely notated, but superordinate qualities, such as tempo, the basic dynamic degree, and the attack intensity, are only determined by the respective previous group. The Momente, that is ‘moments’, for soprano, four choir groups, and thirteen instrumentalists (1961–2) (Stockhausen 1964j, 1971b, and 2014h), too, are ‘no finished work with a clearly defined beginning, form flow and end; rather, they are an ambiguous composition of independent events’ (Stockhausen 1964l: 130). The idea of the ‘moment’ continues the group principle in technical terms, except with a higher level of serial ‘freedom’ and technical independence. The Momente combine many of Stockhausen’s compositional experiences since 1951. In this regard, they are key, not just with respect to length and complexity. One central aspect is
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the ‘abolition of the dualism between vocal music and instrumental music, between sound and silence, between sound and noise’ (Stockhausen 1964l: 130). Stockhausen transferred numerous qualities of electronic music into vocal composition, thereby establishing ‘sounds scales’ of ‘articulations’ and ‘noises’ (Stockhausen 1964l: 131–2). Using their hands, feet, and mouths, choir singers continuously generate noises, with and without aids. Underpinning this are scales which provide unvoiced, noisy consonants between vocal and instrumental sounds, and vowels between breathing and singing. In the 1960s, there were two trends to be observed in Stockhausen’s musical work which reflected further relaxation of the initially strict rules of serial composition. For one, in electronic compositions like Telemusik (1966) and Hymnen (1966–7), he fell back on already existent forms of socalled ‘found music’ (cf. Stockhausen 1971d; Erbe 2004). For a second, he granted far-reaching freedoms to those who interpreted his instrumental works. In Telemusik, forms of cult and folk music from different countries served as source material; in Hymnen, the source material was forty or so national anthems from all over the world, ‘the most familiar music imaginable’ (Stockhausen 1995: 122). While such a recourse to traditional, preexisting musical material was something that Stockhausen could hardly have conceived of in the early 1950s (cf. Stockhausen 1971d: 80), in the context of increasing globalisation and mobility, he would establish a new, integrative concept of ‘world music’ or rather ‘universal music’ associated with the utopia ‘music of the whole world, all countries and races’ (Stockhausen 1971d: 75; cf. Schumacher 1998; Gruber 1998; Heile 2009). Also, the serial handling of material properties would became increasingly multipurpose on the path to technical composition from 1970 onwards: in Hymnen, Stockhausen developed the ‘intermodulation’ procedure, with which, for example, ‘the rhythm of a hymn was modulated with the harmony of another hymn, and the result was in turn modulated with the constellation of timbres and with the melodic course of electronic sounds’ (Stockhausen 1971c: 98). Stockhausen’s instrumental compositions of the 1960s were marked by a significant increase in interpretational freedom. In parallel, the term ‘organism’, which Stockhausen was already using in previous contexts as far as characterisation of his works was concerned, gained greater significance. Process compositions such as Plus–Minus (1963), Solo (1965–6), Prozession (1967), Kurzwellen (1968), and Spiral (1968) are based on serially designed form gradients which are ‘enlivened’ in detail by those performing, allowing one to experience the ‘structure formation process’,
The Serial Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen
which is to say ‘the emergence and fall of multi-layered processes’ (Stockhausen 1971f: 86). The processes applied in the scores enable individual ‘multiple interpretations’, as well as the integration of newer, unspecified materials for the creation of ‘musical beings’ or ‘living organisms’ (Stockhausen 1971e: 40). Live electronic media are also frequently used. The scores now define, for example, ‘structural parts’ and ‘shape types’, and the ‘overall trend resulting from changes’ or ‘level of change’, such as through ‘transformation signs’ (like plus and minus symbols) (Stockhausen 1971e: 43–6), which can mean higher, louder, longer, greater and lower, quieter, shorter, less. Unpredictable materials frequently considered by Stockhausen include sound outputs from a shortwave receiver: interpreters look for an output from the radio device and respond to it according to the fixed process given in the score. The creative role granted to performers as the work was played peaked at the end of the 1960s in the text compositions that Stockhausen brought together under the description ‘intuitive music’. These are purely verbal instructions which – when following the basic principle of serial scaling – form the opposite end of the spectrum from the strictly structured selective compositions of the early 1950s. The interpretations of these texts should not be improvisations of material already known; rather, they should continue to live up to the dictum of innovation by sharing experiences about ‘the limited scope of the rational’. Following the many ‘stages of primarily rational music’, Stockhausen was now concerned with ‘discovering different archetypes of musical processes through the different texts, each of which leads to their own musical happenings’ (Stockhausen 1971a: 124). The zeitgeist of such years is also reflected in the spiritual dimension, in which one may find elements of the ‘intuitive’: traces of Fluxus and Happenings, hippies, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, and the student movement can also be found in Stockhausen’s work. However, once again, the ‘mental-spiritual [das Geistig-Geistliche]’ facet hints at another constant which has not yet been discussed: Stockhausen’s music, from his first work to his last, features a religious overtone (cf. Stockhausen 2014g: 214 and 2014e; Peters 1999 and 2003; Ulrich 2006). Stockhausen originally grew up in a Catholic environment, in the Bergisches Land near Cologne. In a way that paralleled his own life experiences, and encounters with other countries and cultures, later on in his life he would distance himself from Catholicism in favour of an expanded universal belief. The conviction that the universe is sensibly ordered by the divine was and remained a central factor. The same principle of divine order and perfection is reflected in the small and the large,
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and in nature and art. However, music is not just a depiction of cosmic order; at the same time, it also serves as a tool of ongoing worship of God. This conviction is the main thread of all Stockhausen’s works and at the same time the cornerstone of his serial thinking. After all, from the start, Stockhausen understood the overriding structural principle of a work as a reflex of the ‘universal order’. As early as 1953, he was occupied with the question of why composers attempted to organise ‘everything existing in a composition . . . by one unified principle’ (Stockhausen 1963i: 46), which is to say ‘the proportions of the series’: Evidently, self contemplation and the awareness of a universal, planned order go ‘further than ever’ and, with this, the desire to give the individual tone a very specific sense that transcends momentary saturation and the mere play of organis ing and combining; a sense, that is, of music as a conception of that comprehensive ‘global’ structure in which everything is embraced. (Stockhausen 1963i: 46 7)
This view is just as central to intuitive music as it is to the formula composition developed by Stockhausen from 1970 onwards (Stockhausen 2014e: 151–2). The year 1970 marks a climax in Stockhausen’s compositional career. The Federal Government sent him to the world exhibition ‘Expo 70’ in Osaka, Japan, as a prominent representative of the German music scene. In the spherical concert hall – built by the architect Fritz Bornemann in line with Stockhausen’s plans for Germany’s contribution – his works were presented for five-and-a-half hours a day for almost six months. It was a site for listening to a compilation of electronic and current instrumental compositions which were projected to the public through loudspeakers in surround sound. In this environment, following a long phase of indefinite, polyvalent and intuitive music, Stockhausen once again composed a comprehensive, serially determined work: Mantra for two pianos. For the first time, a so-called formula served as the musical nucleus of the work. The principle of composing with one or more formulas characterises Stockhausen’s work from Mantra onwards, right up until the completion of the Licht heptalogy. Stockhausen had defined the serial thinking of the 1950s as a dualistic kind of thinking based on gradual mediation between opposing pairs, but, in contrast, he also described formula composition with the metaphor that, now, it was possible to transform ‘a mouse in a glass’ (Stockhausen 2014a: 193; cf. Stockhausen 2014d: 274–5). The term ‘formula’ suggests different things: the magic formula in the sense of a magic word, a formula as known from a scientific perspective, but also Einstein’s dream of a universal
The Serial Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen
formula (Stockhausen 2014d: 275). For Stockhausen, formula thinking was, at the same time, a global constant, which can be traced back to Franco-Flemish isorhythm, to Indian ragas and talas or to archetypes of Chinese or Greek music. Johann Sebastian Bach, Olivier Messiaen, and Anton Webern were Stockhausen’s key figures in music history, and they knew about ‘the ancient tradition of forming things with archetypes’, he claimed (Stockhausen 2014i: 28). Stockhausen regarded formula composition as a ‘differentiated further development of serial music . . . including the intermediate stages (namely: aleatoricism and indeterminacy or variable determinism)’ (Stockhausen 2014i: 26), which brings back some essential qualities of pre-serial music which had previously been in a state of paralysis: melody, echoes of tonal harmony or the use of key intervals of tonal music, repeatability, singability, and tangible, concise figures and variative shape formation (cf. Stockhausen 2014k: 307–8). Nevertheless, the formulas themselves and the act of composition comply with serial regularities which are highly complex. A formula is no abstract sequence of sound properties, but rather a musical structure which is catchy, melodic, rhythmically specific, and individually characterised in many different ways. All musical characteristics, which were initially determined in mutually independent series of numbers and proportions when serial composition first started, are now synthesised in the formula (cf. Stockhausen 2014f: 254). After Stockhausen had written works using a formula – such as Mantra (1970), Inori (1973–4), and Sirius (1975–7) – between 1977 and 2003 he composed his opera cycle Licht, based on a unique so-called ‘superformula’. The super-formula for Licht is a three-part melodic structure lasting around one minute, which served as a matrix for the twenty-ninehour heptalogy. In addition, the action of the cycle is included, at an embryonic level, in the music-genetic material of the super-formula. In the term ‘multi-formular music’, Stockhausen summarised the further development of formula technology thus: Multi formula music works with three or more formulas, the synchronous com bination of which leads to a super formula. . . . Multi formular composition, fol lowing a long historic turn of the expansion spiral (increasingly complicated proportions in rhythm metrics, melody harmonics, timbristics, dynamics and typology; including all serial extensions up to extremely aperiodic, aleatory, momentary and universal stylistic), picks up where classic two subject matter stumbled in favour of a processual, discursive formation. . . . Multi formular music is the polyphonic integration of all musical achievements of the twentieth century. (Stockhausen 1989a: 667)
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The three levels of the super-formula represent the three main characters of Licht: Eva, Michael, and Luzifer. Each formula is based on core pitch material: Eva’s melody has twelve chromatic semitones, Michael’s has thirteen, and Luzifer’s has eleven. Seven horizontal sections make up the basic material for the seven opera days. On the basis of the core pitches, Stockhausen composed ‘core formulas’ for Michael, Eva, and Luzifer, which differed melodically, rhythmically, and dynamically. These were supplemented by a variety of musical characteristics and events unique to each one. Each formula includes not only pitches, durations, intensities, timbres, and (where appropriate) spatial positions. Also included are echoes and pre-echoes, improvisations, scales, pure and timbred breaks, modulations, rhythmic characterisations, sounds, and semantic details. Ultimately, the super-formula for Licht results from the vertical combination of the three individual formulas. All musical contexts of the opera cycle are generated from them, the compositional structure becoming increasingly condensed and moulded through segmentation, spreading or compressions, concatenations, overlaps, transpositions, insertion of segments, and other procedures. Musically, each formula represents one of the three main figures: Eva’s formula is particularly melodic, featuring rising-falling-rising fine glissandi, with a central interval of a major third. The direction of Michael’s formula is a descending one: characteristic intervals are fourths along with a ‘floating tritone’ at the end; the main characteristic is the dynamic; the formula contains a triple echo. The Luzifer formula melody begins with tone repetitions in elevenths, followed by a passage which ‘jumps up twice and falls each time thereafter’, and is pervaded by dissonant intervals like sevenths and tritones, along with oddnumbered rhythms such as fifths, sevenths, thirteenths, or ‘irregular complexity’ (Stockhausen 1989b: 357–8). Luzifer’s formula also includes noises, unvoiced consonants, improvisations, and a double falling echo. The three cosmic spirits Eva, Michael, and Luzifer appear in the various sections of the opera, where they sing, play, and dance. The movements of the musicians are normally fixed in terms of composition. The figure of Eva is linked to the basset horn, Michael is connected with the trumpet, and Luzifer’s instrument is the trombone. For each day of the week there are individual timbres, symbols, scents, elements, and more, depending on the topic of the weekday. For the events in Licht, Stockhausen drew on numerous cultural and historical sources, such as religions, mythologies, fairy tales, or collectives of literature. Even biographical information was included in the scenario. In Licht, Stockhausen consistently put forward the basic idea that manifested itself
The Serial Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen
in his earliest years of composing: he wanted to ‘develop worlds from one core’. That is to say, ‘Licht is nothing more than a galaxy developed from a single core formula’ (Stockhausen 2014i: 26). Stockhausen’s music, which is neither expressive nor subjective or emotional, aims at what is universal, timeless, binding for all. This characteristic is reflected not least in the temporal cycles which are the subjects of his compositions: in Sternklang (1971) Stockhausen translated constellations into notes; Sirius (1974–7) is a work about the four seasons of the year; Tierkreis (1974–5) is music dedicated to the twelve zodiacal signs; Der Jahreslauf (1977/91) illustrates the temporal course of millennia, centuries, decades, and years; the Licht cycle stages the seven days of the week. The last major cycle, incomplete at the time of Stockhausen’s death, Klang, is dedicated to the hours of the day, but ends with the twenty-first hour, Paradies. In Klang, Stockhausen returned to a simpler serial process based on a double all-interval series. The sketches of the Klang cycle show that most of the hours were composed without complex predeterminations. As Stockhausen put it in the 1950s, stating it as the goal of serial notation, he wrote Klang, so to speak, ‘as if one had grown a beak’ (Stockhausen 1963i: 48). Looking back at Stockhausen’s complete oeuvre, the consistency and scope of his serial thinking are conspicuous. The associated ‘mental attitude’ can be described as a fruitful mixture of deep faith, well-founded knowledge about the cosmos and nature, and an almost inexhaustible artistic creativity and creative power, coupled with the standard of always making heard something musical that was new and unknown, again and again. One of the essential premises of serial composition lies in equal rights for all elements of a work while at the same time allowing for consideration of their diversity. This is associated with a departure from the hierarchical thinking that characterises tonal music above all else. Stockhausen was deeply convinced of the sustainability of serial thinking, not least because it opened up a wide range of compositional integration options and rejects subjective expression in favour of general, cosmic truths.
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Luigi Nono and the Development of Serial Technique angela ida de benedictis and veniero rizzardi
Among the Italian composers engaged with the redefinition of musical language through (multiple) serialism, Luigi Nono was the first to articulate a theoretical reflection about this technique. As it is demonstrated through Nono’s correspondence with Bruno Maderna and Karlheinz Stockhausen, his earliest conversations about serialism, of an entirely private nature, date back to 1951 to 1952. However, it was only in later years, between 1956 and 1957, that Nono decided to take up a public discussion of serial technique from the perspective of its historical foundation. Considering that multiple serialism – that is, an approach that treats multiple musical parameters in a serial manner – was conceived around 1950 to 1951, and that composers had been positioning themselves around the new technique since then, Nono’s initiative may appear tardy. At that time, however, the theme of history as a dialectical process was at the centre of Nono’s thought, which was influenced by both Marx and Gramsci. In the summer 1956, Nono took part in a seminar organised by Hermann Scherchen and centred on the analysis of Schoenberg’s Variations op. 31 and Webern’s Variations op. 30 (Nono 1956; cf. Schoenberg 2011). It was in this context that Nono developed his earliest (public) reflections on serialism, which he illustrated in a short article published in the same year examining the development in the way in which the series had been employed beginning from Schoenberg’s Serenade op. 24 and the main theme of his Variations op. 31 up to the work of Boulez, Stockhausen, and in Nono’s own latest composition, Il canto sospeso (1955–6) (cf. Nono 2018b). Also in 1956, Luciano Berio had invited Nono to contribute an analytical article to the first issue of his journal, Incontri Musicali (Nono to Berio, 10 January 1956, Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel). In response, Nono wrote a detailed analysis of the ‘Thema’ of Schoenberg’s op. 31, which he further developed for a lecture
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Translated by Siel Agugliaro.
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that he gave in Darmstadt in 1957 and later published under the title ‘The Development of Serial Technique’ (De Benedictis and Rizzardi 2018b). The main purpose of both the 1956 article and the 1957 paper was to demonstrate a direct continuity in compositional strategies between Schoenberg and the music of the so-called Darmstadt School (a term first more widely popularised by Nono in his 1957 essay, though coined at least a year earlier (cf. Wehagen 1956)). In these writings, Nono implicitly opposed the theories that Boulez had been promoting since 1951, especially Boulez’s argument regarding Schoenberg’s presumed ‘confusion between theme and series’ in his ‘serial works’, an opinion that was well entrenched among many composers in the Darmstadt music circles (Boulez 1991f: 212). Nono’s analysis of the op. 31 theme aims, in particular, at overturning Boulez’s theories. From Nono’s perspective, the foundation of serial composition lies precisely in the combinatory possibilities implicitly underpinning the thematic process which generates the variations devised by Schoenberg. Nono’s argument also rested on his interpretation of the BACH motif in Schoenberg’s Variations as ‘a thematic-formal element independent of and pre-existing the row itself!’ (Nono 2018b: 129). In Nono’s view, this motif acts as a secondary combinatory texture, traversing the entire composition. In spite of its implicitly polemical stance, however, Nono’s approach only found limited resonance among his peers. The text of his 1957 Darmstadt lecture was published in German only, and the portion on the Variation’s theme did not appear in Incontri Musicali, simply because of a disagreement with Berio over the style of the essay. Ironically, Nono’s article was replaced by another one by Henri Pousseur that advanced the argument that Nono had attempted to reject – namely, the discontinuity between the thematicism of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique and the foundation of the New Music (cf. Pousseur 1956; De Benedictis and Rizzardi 2018b: 148–9). It should be observed that, by 1957, Nono’s serial technique had already been developing from the simultaneous definition of multiple sonic parameters towards the construction of sonic fields. For Nono, however, going back to examine the conceptual continuity between series and theme was, at that time, a way to demonstrate a consistency in the evolution of his own technical choices since the beginnings of his career. It is thus necessary to clarify how this continuity can be verified in time going back to Nono’s earliest experiences with the twelve-tone technique and, so, to his earliest attempts as a composer tout court. While describing this earlier portion of his musical output, it would be reductive and historically inaccurate,
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however, to discuss Nono’s first experiences with serial or proto-serial technique without a parallel consideration of Bruno Maderna’s procedures, because the didactic workshop in which the latter had invited him to take part in Venice in 1946 would soon become a creative workshop, where the analysis of early and contemporary music was inextricably connected with compositional experimentation on the grounds of shared aesthetic and technical premises. As is well known, the catalyst that encouraged Maderna and his pupil Nono’s transition to serialism was their encounter with Hermann Scherchen during the conducting course that Scherchen directed at the Venice Biennale in August and September 1948. Scherchen engaged as his assistant for this course his former pupil Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, who had emigrated to Brazil in 1937. During his several-month-long stay in Italy, Koellreutter strengthened his relationship with Maderna and Nono, who in November 1948 attended a course on twelve-tone music that he taught in Milan. Nono’s personal notes from that course show that Koellreutter based his teaching on Paul Hindemith’s theories, in particular the idea of tonal relationships founded on acoustic ‘natural’ laws and the consequent classification of intervals according to their own ‘melodic’ and ‘harmonic strength’, directly derived from Hindemith’s Unterweisung im Tonsatz. At that time, Nono and Maderna were both already familiar with Hindemith’s treatise, and they had been adopting its main principles since their earliest attempts at coordinating advanced twelve-tone techniques with a serialisation of durations and/or rhythms (Guerrero 2009; cf. Nono 2018a: 27). Many of the rules that Koellreutter proposed in his class, however, revolved around his taxonomy of ‘melodic’ rows (where ‘tense’ intervals prevail), ‘harmonic’ rows (with a majority of ‘calm’ intervals), and ‘compensated’ rows, balanced between the two. These appear in just these terms in both Nono’s and Maderna’s notes and musical sketches at least until the end of 1951. Beginning from this moment, such a classification of musical material would be permanently inscribed within the compositional technique of both Nono and Maderna, and its influence would extend throughout their use of twelve-tone technique and beyond it in their respective properly serial and post-serial phases. Works such as Liriche greche (1949), Maderna’s first serial composition, and Nono’s opus primum, the Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell’op. 41 di Arnold Schönberg (1950), are the result of the assimilation of Hindemith’s ideas via Koellreutter and already demonstrate how both composers distanced themselves from the Viennese School models that their Italian colleagues Luigi Dallapiccola, Riccardo Malipiero, Riccardo Nielsen, and
Luigi Nono and the Development of Serial Technique
Camillo Togni were more or less slavishly following in the same years. Leaving aside other formal elements that referred to pre-classical if not to Renaissance models, in Nono and Maderna’s works the tone row is not only presented in its retrograde, inverted, and transposed forms but is also subject to permutation, sieving, and proliferation. Most importantly, the tone row is not the only musical material to receive systematic treatment: note durations, while organised independently at first, are later coordinated with the tone row itself. The most significant aspect of Maderna and Nono’s compositional strategy is their creation of tone rows based on the expressivity implied in their intervallic content and their reliance on intervallic quality for the determination of the row’s transformations. This is a recurring aspect in Nono’s serial works of the following years. On many levels, the aforementioned Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell’op. 41 di Arnold Schönberg is an exceptional debut composition. Already in its title, Nono announces his intention of applying a process of transformation of the original pitch material, intended as a ‘theme’ but only in an abstract sense, with no regard to (or for) the historical form of the variation. By taking to extremes a typical compositional practice of the Viennese School – that is, the deduction of formal consequences from the intrinsic characteristics of the basic pitch material – Nono begins from the distinctive structure of Schoenberg’s row, whose symmetrical configuration is repeated as such also within its hexachords; indeed, each individual movement of the Variazioni canoniche is built on the ‘mirror image’ (Spiegelbild) principle. Furthermore, in accordance with the principle of intervallic ‘calmness’ and ‘tension’, Nono generates a first variation on Schoenberg’s row by deriving from it three permuted rows completely different from the original – one of them with a prevalence of fourths and major thirds, another one based on tritones, semitones, and minor thirds, and a third one which is more differentiated. The preliminary sketches show that Nono meant to start from each of the three rows that he had generated, plus the original one, to build four distinct episodes differentiated from each other according to their degree of ‘tension’. This project would never be realised, perhaps because Nono preferred to exercise more direct control over the intervals. Yet such a project exemplifies the consistency of Nono’s proto-serial thought, which at that time already tended towards a simultaneous coordination of multiple sound parameters. Indeed, the Variazioni canoniche adopt a systematic device for the assignment of durations, a serie base (a ‘basic row’, as Nono called it in his sketches) consisting of six different units: five individual duration values respectively equalling 8, 7, 6, 5, and 4 semiquavers plus another value
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corresponding to 3+2+1 semiquavers that works as the only germ of the motivic material used in the entire work (cf. Rizzardi 2004: 13). It should be noted that such a treatment of durations is unique in Nono’s work. Its relatively abstract character did not appear again in his later compositions, which are mostly based on pre-existing rhythmic models. Indeed, a first association between the pitch and the duration series underpins the complex double mirror canon of the first movement, ‘Largo vagamente’, but it is only in the following movements (‘Andante moderato’ and ‘Allegro violento’) that a systematic coordination between pitches (permutations of rows divided in six dyads) and durations (permutations of six values) can be clearly observed. The coexistence of increasingly sophisticated techniques of proliferation and pre-compositional organisation of pitch material on the one hand, and of systematically organised rhythmic structures on the other, is a feature of the compositional procedures of both Maderna and Nono beginning in 1951. In that year, Maderna devised a technique that Nono would also soon adopt, and which would be remarkably successful: namely, a system for the transformation of the basic pitch material in the direction of a rhythmic and harmonic pre-organisation based on the graphic representation of pitches. Maderna sometimes refers to this technique using the term mutazione (‘mutation’) or describes it, along with Nono, as a ‘(magic) square’ treatment. The originality of this technique consists in the use of a basic pitch series for the automatic generation of chains of derived series not just of individual pitches, but also of different elements that may be either note aggregates or ‘empty’ positions (Figure 10.1a). Using this method, it is possible to create a reserve of material that is already intimately related to the rhythmic and harmonic components and can thus foreshadow the musical form. Maderna first adopts the magic-square technique in a composition entitled Improvvisazione per orchestra (1951) and will use it, in increasingly complex ways, until his Concerto per pianoforte e orchestra (1959). Luciano Berio acknowledged his use of it in his Nones (1954) (personal communication, 2000) and Serenata (1957) (Berio 1985: 65). The title Improvvisazione emphasises the self-organisation of the musical material, and the resulting organisation presents itself as having an intentional reference to fifteenth-century isorhythmic motets: the concatenation of the sequences of pitches/chords/rests corresponds to the color inserted atop the taleae, represented by repeated and systematically ordered (dance) rhythmic patterns (Rizzardi 2011). Nono adopted the same ‘mutations’ technique in his Composizione for orchestra (1951), a work that was premiered in the same concert in which
Luigi Nono and the Development of Serial Technique
Figure 10.1a Composizione per orchestra [No. 1] (1951). Sketch of the precompositional material for bb. 17 25, Archivio Luigi Nono (facsimile)
Maderna’s Improvvisazione was first performed. In Composizione, Nono’s implementation of this technique was both more consistent and at the same time less reliant upon the automatic elements of the ‘mutational’ compositional process than Maderna had been in his work. Only in one out of the five ‘episodes’ of Composizione are all the elements – pitch organisation, chordal aggregates, distribution of durations and rests – rigorously based on ‘mutations’ of the original row (Figure 10.1b). Whereas in the first movement the duration of neighbouring notes is determined by the ‘calm/ tension’ factor intrinsic to each given interval, the prevailing structural feature of the four remaining movements consists of a contrapuntal arrangement of rhythmic modules predetermined from the transformations of a basic tone row. Nono actually in all of the ‘episodes’ of his Composizione [No. 1] for orchestra uses a series of nine sounds, assigning the remaining three to the timpani in the percussive movement that ends the work (Rizzardi 2004, 47–59). In Nono’s immediately preceding work, Polifonica–Monodia–Ritmica (1951), movements are similarly organised by means of compositional devices, each producing a different kind of development of the original material. In Polifonica, the first, extensive movement of this work, Nono’s tendency to make serial techniques instrumental in the achievement of specific poetic goals can be observed for the first time. In this case, the building of a progressive development from silence into noise and finally into the individual pitch (that is, to melody) that can be in turn used for contrapuntal construction is realised through an automatic process of reduction and progressive ‘indifferentiation’ – until annihilation – of the
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Figure 10.1b Composizione per orchestra [No.1] (1951). Score realisation of bb. 17 25 (Ars Viva Verlag).
basic tone row (see Figures 10.2a, 10.2b, 10.3) that allows him simultaneously to obtain both the pitch material and the distribution of durations, up to the point where a predetermined rhythmic model intervenes. This model is based on a motive that, according to Nono, alludes to a traditional Afro-Brazilian candomblé rhythm (‘Jemanjá’), which is in turn deconstructed and permutated through serial procedures (Figure 10.4). Polifonica’s successor, Monodia, sees the first appearance of a form that would regularly appear in Nono’s later music. This monodic form is the outcome of an entirely linear process resulting from the concatenation of
Luigi Nono and the Development of Serial Technique
Figure 10.1b (cont.)
derived, regular twelve-tone rows that are symmetrically organised: ‘harmonic’ rows prevail at the far ends of the chain and ‘melodic’ ones predominate towards the centre. Nono derived this form from a number of transformations (for which he had employed the ‘mutation’ technique for the first time) but eventually omitted any vertical implications from the outcome of such transformations. The harmonic component of
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Figure 10.2a Polifonica Monodia Ritmica (1951). Generation of ‘degrading’ intervallic material of the opening four part canon of Polifonica (bb. 1 40)
Monodia, which is implicit to the ‘calm/tension’ division, already prefigures the linearisation of harmonic groups that Nono, although in a different technical context, would use in his Canti di vita e di amore of 1962.
Luigi Nono and the Development of Serial Technique
Figure 10.2a (cont.)
The following cycle of compositions on lyrics by Federico García Lorca (1952–3), and the Due Espressioni for orchestra (1953) further expand the development of complex rhythms deriving from folk models (Borio 2004).
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Figure 10.2b Polifonica Monodia Ritmica (1951). Precomposition of the opening four part canon of Polifonica, derived tone rows from the O form and rhythmic organization (bb. 1 40)
In these works, however, the organisation of pitches temporarily departs from twelve-tone materials. As Nono himself would recall in 1987: At that time, I was still under the influence of those studies that Scherchen had made me do using three or four notes. If you take the pieces of Epitaffio, you will see that they are based on four or five notes and have nothing to do with a twelve tone series. These four or five notes might come from the Bandiera rossa . . . or, in the final song of the Guardia civil, simply from the notes of the six strings of the guitar. (Nono 2018a: 55)
However, even when these pre-existing musical materials are chosen because of their allusive or symbolic value – in La Victoire de Guernica
Figure 10.3 Polifonica–Monodia–Ritmica (1951). Four-part canon (bb. 1–40) built by reading each of the four derivations right to left, bottom up, beginning with sparse sounds and gradually filling the space (score, Ars Viva, excerpts: bb. 1–28)
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Figure 10.4 Polifonica Monodia Ritmica (1951). Serial permutations of the Afro Brazilian rhythm (‘Jemanjá’) employed in the movement Polifonica (sketch, Archivio Luigi Nono; facsimile)
(1954), for instance, Nono borrows the melody of the Internationale – they are always transformed through serial procedures: rhythmic motives are systematically decomposed and permutated, and pitches are subject to ‘square’ treatment until all the notes of the total chromatic are obtained.
Luigi Nono and the Development of Serial Technique
Such compositional choices depart from the more abstract experimentations of Nono’s contemporaries, and because of this they earned him quite a few criticisms. While Maderna himself reproached Nono, albeit in general terms, for the literary drifting of his recent works, Stockhausen made much more detailed criticisms in his private correspondence to Nono, accusing the Italian composer of inconsistency in his use of serial techniques. In a letter dated 9 May 1953, in particular, Stockhausen comments on Nono’s Epitaffi in the following terms: The impression of your music (in the last works) is the grand gesture, complex , , , (melody + accom series form, paniment), periodic, torn apart by block like contrasting groups. I think Schönberg and Berg might be brilliant end points here. The structure of timbre and individu alisation of tones, however, points toward a penetration into microscopic musical structural contexts. One expects the idea of a global, immanently homogeneous sonic world, a consequence of this differentiated relationship to the individual tone and to fine grained relationships between tones. But then you don’t include differentiation between the two sound characteristics of volume and rhythm. Dynamically, one hears surfaces dead surfaces, just the same with respect to rhythm (this results from the imbalance of short and long durations, between group rhythms and individual rhythms). The timbre and tone sequence structure, however, say something else. And the importance of registral proportions, so important for the clarity of listening, is hardly considered. (9 May 1953, Archivio Luigi Nono)
In his response, which he only wrote two months later, Nono rejected Stockhausen’s argument, but without further elaborating. Yet it is striking that, from the end of 1953, Nono began to steer towards that ‘homogeneous sonic world’ typical of total serialism, which in 1955 would lead to Canti per tredici and, more importantly, Incontri. In Canti per tredici, Nono began to employ the most neutral pitch material possible, the all-interval series, which he would regularly use in all of his works between Il canto sospeso (1955–6) and Cori di Didone for choir and percussion (1958). This series also appears in Composizione per orchestra n. 2: Diario polacco ’58 (1959) and – together with other kinds of series – in the azione scenica (‘scenic action’) Intolleranza 1960 (1960–1).
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In Incontri, a tone row mostly based on major and minor seconds does not transform or generate anything and always presents itself in its original form, while all the other sound parameters (duration, timbre, and dynamics) change. The work is made of two mirroring macrosections, parts of a perfectly symmetrical compositional process. These two blocks are internally differentiated by extension and polyphonic density, dimensions that are simultaneously regulated according to the numerical principle of the Fibonacci series. The title Incontri (Encounters) refers to the interpenetration of two symmetrical structures, each characterised by the merging of two complementary expressive characters. But even leaving aside its symbolic implications and private allusions, this is a manifesto score. The clarity of its structure prompted an early wave of scholarly musical analysis that contributed to propagating the image of Nono as a rigorous serialist composer, and which would lead later generations of researchers to overlook the originality, complexity, and incessant development of his technique (cf. Wennerstrom 1967: 217–33; Stenzl 1972; Piencikowski 1988). However, what appears to be an exercise of serialist rigour and coherence is nothing but Nono’s earliest codification of a musical constructivism focused on the complexity of sound phenomena, an integral part of a long-term development. Nono himself expressed criticisms about serialist hyper-determination, especially after 1960, even distancing himself from his own most rigorous applications of this technique, as, similarly, did Boulez (cf. Boulez 1986a). In the autumn of that year, Nono, who had just emerged from a public debate with Stockhausen (discussed below, p. 171) about the serial treatment of Il canto sospeso, privately wrote that the ‘theocratic’ principle of total determination had always been extraneous to him: ‘in Varianti (1957) I came as close to that principle as possible, as far as study, self-discipline and result analysis are concerned. But it has mostly been distant from me’ (Mila and Nono 2010: 48). And in 1969, during an interview, he added (perhaps more lucidly): I can only agree with the ‘serialist’ label with some reservations. Even back then I did not write what critics would call ‘integrally organised music’ [durchorganisierte Musik]. I used to work, so to speak, in three stages. First of all, I would choose the material intervallic, timbral, rhythmic. Then I would experiment with this material, perhaps I would subject it to different predetermining processes, but only so that I could see the direction towards which it could develop. And then I would compose, that is I would deduce an appropriate form from the material and the possibilities inscribed in it. For me, composing was never about the
Luigi Nono and the Development of Serial Technique
concretisation of predetermined structures. Improvisational elements were always at play; I would leave decisions open until up to the last moment. (Nono [1969] 1975: 200)
While from the standpoint of Nono’s poetics it is possible to position his highest degree of involvement with generalised serialism in the years between 1955 and 1959, the composer’s later distancing from this technique seems to circumscribe and minimise its value as a technical principle and to prioritise instead the functional value of systematic compositional processes. This interpretation may be reductive, but it is certainly true that Nono invests serialism with different functions and meanings over time. Speaking about Nono’s output based on the use of compositional systems and procedures connected with serialism, some scholars have interpreted this timeframe, 1955 to 1957, as a ‘second serial phase’, followed by a ‘third phase’ represented by the works that he composed between 1957 and 1959 (cf. Schaller 1997). Rather than depending on a rigid timeline, we would like to suggest a kind of bipartition, which is instead articulated around specific developments in Nono’s work regarding the application of serial principles to musical structures derived from a text. This subdivision hinges on Il canto sospeso (1955–6), a work fraught with innovations and changes from the perspective of Nono’s compositional technique that inaugurate his research of a ‘new expressiveness in the song’ (Nono 2001: 432). Originally chosen because of their poetic contents or their ethical and political message, these texts provided the starting ground for the selection of all the musical materials (see Figure 10.5). Indeed, it is the structure intrinsic to the verbal material (from the ‘quantitative’ perspective of formal subdivisions, of verses, of single words, and so on down to the number of syllables and vowels) that determine the choice of the basic ‘fields’ (following Nono’s own description) that regulate durations, speed, intervals, density, and every other parameter. It was the peculiar intonation of the text in Il canto sospeso that sparked the well-known debate that divided Nono and Stockhausen after 1957. Again, five years after a letter in which Stockhausen had expressed his annoyance regarding the ‘resorting to subjectivity’, the reliance on ‘predetermined expressive content’, and finally ‘pathos of the intonation of Neruda[’s poem]’ (4 September 1952, Archivio Luigi Nono), the controversy was framed on the level of compositional technique, whereby such technique is put at the service of a text intentionally loaded, both ethically and politically. After his initial disapproval of the programmatic approach adopted in Epitaffi per Federico García Lorca, Stockhausen seemed
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Figure 10.5 Typescript of Luigi Nono with text selection and sketches for Cori di Didone (Archivio Luigi Nono)
unwilling to understand the treatment of text in Nono’s compositions following La Victoire de Guernica (1954), a work in which his serial compositional practice had clearly evolved, visible, too, in the involvement of choral ensembles. Stockhausen’s accusations of poor ‘observance’ of serial precepts on Nono’s part eventually moved from a personal to a public level with his anathema incorporated into ‘Sprache und Musik’, a
Luigi Nono and the Development of Serial Technique
lecture that he delivered at Darmstadt during the New Music Courses of 1957 (cf. Stockhausen 1964d; English translation: Stockhausen 1964e). The specific target of Stockhausen’s analysis was the second movement of Il canto sospeso, which the German composer interpreted according to serial or statistical criteria that were very distant from Nono’s compositional horizon. Take, for instance, Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–6), where the voice is elaborated along with the electroacoustic material according to specific ‘scales of intelligibility’ and through permutational structures conceived for the purpose of preserving the intelligibility of the text and to separate its use as sonic material from its semantic value (cf. Decroupet and Ungeheuer 1998). Nono’s vocal writing technique had precise motivations, strictly related to the content of the text chosen, whose intelligibility, however, ended up being almost precluded; his conception diverged from Stockhausen’s, who was puzzled by this apparent contradiction and attacked Nono precisely on this issue: ‘Why, then, texts at all, and why these texts?’ (Stockhausen 1964d: 158). What is the point of ‘serialising’ such weighty and meaningful texts – he asked – if musical structures end up completely preventing the listener from understanding even a syllable? As Stockhausen put it: [Nono] does not interpret, he does not comment. He rather reduces speech to its sounds and makes music with them. Permutations of vowel sounds, a, ä, e, i, o, u; serial structure. Should he not have chosen sounds in the first place, rather than texts so rich in meaning? At least for the sections where only the phonetic proper ties of speech are deal with? (Stockhausen 1964e: 48 9. Translation modified)
Nono’s reply to Stockhausen came in the form of ‘Text–Music–Song’ (1960), a public lecture that he also gave in Darmstadt (Nono 2018c). However, Nono’s reticence to discuss the technical aspects of his own music led him not to reply with analytical demonstrations, ultimately leaving the actual ‘serial structure’ of Il canto sospeso unrevealed. Instead, Nono adopted a defensive strategy, motivating his choices from a historical perspective, taking, among others, Schubert and his Lieder as an example. Although he employed a different technique from Schubert’s, Nono argued, ‘the two structural elements, namely sound and word, interpenetrating one another, and the one not being subordinate to the other, form a new and autonomous whole’. And he concluded: ‘Composition with the phonetic elements of a text serves today, as in earlier times, to transpose its semantic meaning into the musical language of the composer’ (Nono 2018c: 154 and 178).
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And yet, a response based on the analysis on the second movement of Il canto sospeso would have sufficed to effectively reply to Stockhausen’s criticisms and explain the peculiarities of his serial compositional technique in 1955–6. In hindsight, such an analytical response would have also shed light on the preconditions that led to the eventual overcoming of this same technique and, perhaps, would have helped to avoid further misunderstandings in the relationship between text and music in Nono’s works. When discussing serialism in Nono’s works based on a text (that is, in most of his compositions from the 1950s), it is important to consider that the choice of parametric materials starts directly from the text (see Figure 10.5 and cf. De Benedictis 2006). Through various transcriptions and gradual text modifications, syllable counts, selection of key words, and the subsequent (re)coding of such words into numbers then associated with the coordination of musical parameters, Nono managed to create a structural grid of the various musical elements that was predetermined by and from the verbal material. In the specific case of the second movement of Il canto sospeso (the sole section for voices only, from the nine movements of which this work consists) it should be immediately pointed out that the compositional technique adopted by Nono presents numerous similarities with movements no. 6b and, especially, no. 9. Not by chance, these three sections are also connected by the content of their respective texts (drawn from Malvezzi and Pirelli 1954), whose main theme invites a conscious acceptance of death in the name of a better future. The textual similarities between the three movements find a counterpart in the use of a shared compositional technique that could be called ‘uninterrupted sound [suono continuo]’ and that entails a multidimensional scanning of the text (and its consequent dissolution and perceptual unrecognisability). If one considers that, in Il canto sospeso, the same basic musical material is coordinated with perpetually changing permutational systems that are often chosen depending on the local context – and, in the vocal sections, always according to the semantic of the text – perhaps the most productive question that one must ask in order to understand how Nono chose his coordination principles in his text-based works should be (paraphrasing Stockhausen): ‘why a structure at all, and why this one?’ In the case of movement no. 2 of Il canto sospeso, the analysis reveals how Nono, by means of a rigorous serial procedure, adapted the (musical) form to the (text) content and built a structure that is flexible enough to distribute the chosen text across voices according to specific expressive intentions. The entire movement consists of fifty bars (bb. 108–57 in the score) in a fixed 2 metre. The basic duration is the crotchet (the tempo is 4 steady: c. 60–66): the result is a total of 100 abstract ‘tiles’ on which sound
Luigi Nono and the Development of Serial Technique
agglomerations can be placed. On a formal level (and as a direct consequence of the implementation of serial materials), the movement is divided in two parts: the first is more extended and corresponds to bb. 108–42; the second (bb. 142–57) is a coda of sorts, consisting of a proportional canon. More specifically, the movement is based on the following materials and principles of parametric coordination:• Durations: In the movement, four duration values are used: the quaver, ; the triplet quaver ; the semiquaver, ; and the quintuplet semiquaver, , which reflect the different possibilities in the division of the crotchet into two, three, four, or five parts respectively. Such values, which regulate the speed, are coordinated with a ‘neutral’ duration series, a Fibonacci sequence made up of twelve factors (six ascending factors followed in symmetrical fashion by an equal number of descending factors), 1–2–3–5–8–13–13–8–5–3–2–1. This series is repeated fifteen times (bb. 108–42) by means of a method of continuous rotation that shifts the first number of the series to the end during each cycle (Table 10.1), though Nono inverts the last two factors in the twelfth iteration. Nono does not employ this method in the second part of the movement (bb. 142–57), in which the duration factors in the series 13–8–5–3–2–1–1–2–3–5–8–13 are linearly associated with each single duration value. In the movement as a whole, the rotation and the coordination of the factors of the Fibonacci series with the four duration values thus determine formal proportions and speed of the sound events. • Pitches: The only tone series used in the entirety of Il canto sospeso is the all-interval series beginning with the pitch A. In the second movement, this series is repeated nineteen times with no permutations or transpositions, rigidly following the distribution of durations in both the sections of the movement (cf. Table 10.1). • Dynamics: In the same movement, dynamics are regulated by a series of twelve different intensity values: 1 ppp
2 p
3 mp
4 mf
5 f
6 ppp
7 pppppp
9 pppppp
11 pp
This series adopts the same criteria for the selection and the rotation applied for the duration series, although in this case the implementation and statistical distribution of the dynamic series operate vertically (and not horizontally as in the case of durations) and a higher degree of freedom can be observed. The series is repeated fifteen times in constant rotation (Table 10.2). In the second portion of the movement, dynamics are freely associated with pitches in
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Table 10.1 Il canto sospeso, no. 2: table coordinating the all-interval series with the duration Fibonacci series (I–XV: bb. 108–42; XVI–XIX (proportional canon): bb. 142–57)
A
B♭
A♭
B
G
C
F♯
C♯
F
D
E
E♭
I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV
1 2 3 5 8 13 13 8 5 3 2 1 2 3
2 3 5 8 13 13 8 5 3 2 1 1 3 5
3 5 8 13 13 8 5 3 2 1 1 2 5 8
5 8 13 13 8 5 3 2 1 1 2 3 8 13
8 13 13 8 5 3 2 1 1 2 3 5 13 13
13 13 8 5 3 2 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 8
13 8 5 3 2 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 8 5
8 5 3 2 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 13 5 3
5 3 2 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 13 8 3 2
3 2 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 13 8 5 2 1
2 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 13 8 5 [3]2 1 1
1 1 2 3 5 8 13 13 8 5 3 [2]3 1 2
XV
5
8
13
13
8
5
3
2
1
1
2
3
XVI XIX
13 8 5 3 2 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 (once for each duration value)
Table 10.2 Il canto sospeso, no. 2: table coordinating the dynamics series with the all-interval series
I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV
A
B♭
A♭
B
G
C
F♯
C♯
F
D
E
E♭
1 2 [9] 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 2 3 4
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1 2 4 5 6
2 3 4 5 6 [6/1] 8 9 10 11 12 1 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1 2 [2] 4 5 7 8 9
[] 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1 2 4 5 6
9 10 11 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 10 11 12
4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1 2 3 5 6 7
12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 1 2 3
5 6 7 [5] [6] 10 11 12 1 2 3 4 6 7 8
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1 2 4 5 6
6 [6] [5] 9 10 11 12 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 9
6 [ ] 8 9 10 11 12 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 [7]
Luigi Nono and the Development of Serial Technique
relation to the expressive meaning of the text. Moreover, it is important to observe the exception of the two last pitches E and E♭, which are assigned the same dynamic factor. The compositional device is set in motion by the preparation of four uninterrupted temporal levels (or ‘time lines’), each associated with one of the four duration values (from the quaver to the quintuplet semiquaver). Pitches are then systematically distributed in the time lines in coordination with the duration factors of the Fibonacci series (see Figure 10.6, showing what may be understood as the first stage of this process, and Figure 10.7, the final draft as seen in the printed score). The first step consists in the pairing, from top to bottom, of the first four pitches of the series (A–B♭–A♭–B) with the first four duration factors (1–2– 3–5). Once the first pitches of each time line are set, an automatic method (the ‘uninterrupted sound’ technique) is executed, whereby the pitchduration pairs are organised in sequence in the available time line without leaving any pauses or gaps. Besides determining instances of rarefaction and thickening in the temporal flow of sound events, the rotation of the Fibonacci series avoids situations in which a given pitch ‘prevails’ upon the others and is thus instrumental in creating an equal distribution of
Figure 10.6 Il canto sospeso, no. 2: schematic rendering of the first three rotations of the parametric series
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Figure 10.7 Il canto sospeso, no. 2: the final outcome of Nono’s compositional device as represented in the score (Ars Viva AV 50)
durations and pitches. The final result is a sort of ‘virtual temporal space’ filled with sound agglomerations that incessantly vary in pitch, duration, and intensity. As mentioned above, this compositional process is interrupted from b. 142 onwards. Starting from the sixteenth iteration of the tone series, Nono abandons the ‘uninterrupted sound’ technique to build a proportional canon in which the Fibonacci series (read from the longest duration, 13, to the shortest one, 1, and backwards in a mirror-like trajectory) is associated with each time level in a linear fashion. Thus, the density of sound events is modulated along a horizontal trajectory, a compositional choice that, as will soon be made clear, is a product of the treatment of the text. The automatism of this procedure apparently makes the interval the only element that allows the author some degree of choice; indeed, it should be reiterated that the arrangement of pitches across different registers is at the composer’s complete discretion. The analysis of the movement’s text structures, however, reveals that this seemingly neutral compositional grid is intentionally designed around specific expressive goals.
Luigi Nono and the Development of Serial Technique
The bipartition of the movement itself and the corresponding diversification in the implementation of the serial material depend on the intention to isolate the last two verses of the text (excerpted from a letter by Anton Popov, a teacher and journalist sentenced to death in Bulgaria): Muoio per un mondo che splenderà con luce tanto forte con tale bellezza, che il mio stesso sacrificio non è nulla. (Per) esso sono morti milioni di uomini sulle barricate e in guerra. Muoio per la giustizia. Le nostre idee vinceranno. I am dying for a world that will shine with light of such strength and beauty that my own sacrifice is nothing. [For] this world millions have died, on the barricades and in war. I am dying for justice. Our ideas will triumph.
The whole process of scanning and distribution of the text across voices and registers is not constrained by any compositional device and exclusively depends on the author’s choices. Two separate treatments of the phonetic material, exactly corresponding to the bipartition of the movement, can be identified: from b. 108 to b. 142 the text ‘floats’ between registers (it expands or contracts depending on the time-flow system shown on Table 10.1), and its distribution is linear, despite the syllabic deconstruction across the various voices. From b. 142 to the end, instead, the text is condensed, creating a sort of ‘semantic block’. This contrast is motivated by the only word that is repeated twice in the whole text: ‘muoio’ (‘I am dying’, bold in the text quoted above). Strikingly, Nono develops his proportional canon at the point at which this crucial word is repeated (bb. 142–57). Precisely in that moment, the Fibonacci series reaches its highest duration factor (13) and is placed in the central register (C2) starting from the longest duration value (quaver). This way the word ‘muoio’ is clearly uttered (and made perceivable), expanded on a single line by a single voice (the second alto, bb. 142–47). All the musical structures in this work are dependent on the textual architecture. First of all, Nono selects specific words and decides to repeat them in succession, overlapping iterations or placing them apart from each other, almost as if creating a ‘hypertext’: ‘muoio’ (×4); ‘mondo’ (×2); ‘splenderà’ (×4); ‘luce’ (×2); ‘non [è]’ (×6); ‘nulla’ (×4); ‘sono’ (×2); ‘morti’ (×3); ‘milioni’ (×4); ‘uomini’ (×2). The sum of these repetitions, not present in the original text, gives as a result: ‘I’m dying / word / will shine / light / is nothing / millions have died.’ A crucial role in such a
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process of semantic reinforcement is assigned to the enhancement of particular vowels, which intensifies the sound density. For their organisation (contra Stockhausen 1964d: 158), Nono does not make use of tables or serial procedures. Every vowel is in fact always related to the word (or the syllable) uttered in that moment. It is an authentic ‘vowel spectrograph’ that accompanies the scansion of the text and reinforces its content (Nono employed this technique in almost all of his serial works for solo voice or choir). It should also be observed that Nono operates this scansion and distribution of the text across voices, registers, and duration values, adopting expressive devices that recall Renaissance madrigalisms. The four iterations of ‘splenderà’, for example, are associated with the shortest duration values (the quintuplet semiquaver and the semiquaver) according to an ascending succession of registers from the lower to the higher voices (bb. 111–5: second tenor, second alto, first alto, first soprano) that emphasise the word’s meaning. Among the many other examples, it is also possible to consider the treatment of the word ‘milioni’, which is repeated four times (bb. 129–39) in a vortex-like process of time expansions and contractions. This word is also the only one in the text to be broken up by rests, as a possible tragic reference to the many lives that the war had taken away (first soprano and second tenor, bb. 129–32). In the last sixteen bars (the proportional canon of bb. 142–57), the individual voices intone a word each. The only exception to this is the first soprano, the highest and most discernible voice, to which Nono assigns the only intelligible sentence of the whole work (‘le idee vinceranno [(our) ideas will triumph]’, bb. 146–50) choosing the most rhythmically incisive duration value (the semiquaver). In the context of such a strict union between serial musical structure and verbal signification, even the punctuation of the text finds its own specific function. We have already mentioned the contrast created by the transition to the proportional canon built concurrently with the repetition of the word ‘muoio’ (that is to say, in close proximity to the period that separates the last two verses). Even more, the rotation method employed for pitches, durations, and intensities is also adapted to the structure of the text: rotations I–VIII correspond to the first sentence (rotations I–V to the first verse, and VI–VIII to the second); rotations IX–XV correspond to the second sentence; and four rotations of the tone series (XVI–XIX) correspond to the concluding proportional canon. In the works that Nono composed after Il canto sospeso, it is on the terrain of vocality – and thus in conjunction with the presence of a verbal structure – that he continues to mould and experiment with new writing techniques involving systems of serial derivation. In particular, Nono’s
Luigi Nono and the Development of Serial Technique
development in the control of material, which can be glimpsed in his Cori di Didone (1958), would gradually lead him towards the new techniques that he adopted in his vocal works at the beginning of the following decade, such as Sarà dolce tacere, for eight solo voices on texts by Cesare Pavese (1960), and ‘Ha venido’. Canciones para Silvia, for soprano and chorus of six sopranos on texts by Antonio Machado (1960). Indeed, these two works open a new and more strictly post-serial phase in Nono’s production. These are the last works in which Nono employed a numerical device (a square), though he also partially adopts a version of this device in Intolleranza 1960, the very last appearance of this technique in Nono’s work (see De Benedictis 2012). As had already happened in Varianti and in La terra e la compagna (both composed in 1957), the twelve figures included in the numeric scheme do not refer to any specific sound parameter in particular but rather work as abstract factors determining the distribution of musical material. As such, the square becomes a permutation matrix that acquires a precise function in the compositional process only if it is linked to (a) a tone series and (b) supplementary coordination devices (or ‘multi-parametric modules’, see Figure 10.8) regulating the single parameters.
Figure 10.8 Multi parametric module prepared for Sarà dolce tacere (used in the second section, bb. 26 67).
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This complex compositional procedure (discussed in detail in De Benedictis 2004) allowed Nono simultaneously to generate and coordinate sound complexes with varying density (gruppi, groups, as in the Figure 10.8) and rhythmic-harmonic stratification (durate and intervalli, durations and intervals). The simultaneity in the coordination of these three elements (groups, durations, and intervals) reveals how Nono’s research on sound became increasingly oriented towards a musical writing based on sound aggregates. In fact, a compositional technique based on ‘groups’ would entirely replace the previous ‘continuous sound’ method – the layering of multiple time lines that Nono had adopted in his Canti per 13 and later perfected in the second and ninth movements of Il canto sospeso (see Figure 10.7). The basic features of the multi-parametric modules remain essentially unchanged from their first appearance at an early stage in La terra e la compagna up to their definitive version in Sarà dolce tacere and, later, in Intolleranza 1960. Conceived for vocal or choral works, these modules are once more developed in strict connection with the verbal material, and, with rare exceptions, they simultaneously coordinate always the same sound parameters. Their ideation and adoption reflect a change of paradigm in the use of serial techniques that is already emergent in Il canto sospeso. With these modules, the preselection of musical materials and their coordination shift from the macro- to the micro-formal level: these compositional procedures are not applied to the entire musical form of the work, but rather to the different parts that compose it, each organised in its specific context. First sketched out in Composizione per orchestra n. 2: Diario polacco ’58 (1959), this particular compositional procedure, based on the juxtaposition of sound events, attains its full form in Canti di vita e d’amore (1962), where constant variation and mobility of sound events become systematic in all its three sections. The coordination of a tone series with the multi-parametric modules replaces the all-interval series and marks the gradual shift to a more explicitly generative compositional technique. In Sarà dolce tacere and ‘Ha venido’, Nono resumes organising his pitch series according to intervallic principles and opting (as he had done in the early 1950s) for a selection process based on expressive criteria. The use of the pitch series in these works also confirms Nono’s departure from a macro-formal compositional logic. In both these vocal compositions, no longer is a single pitch series used throughout the whole work; rather, the number of series corresponds to the number of portions of text being intoned. Nono also employs multiple series in the initial part of Intolleranza 1960 (as ‘character
Luigi Nono and the Development of Serial Technique
rows’ identifying every character in the opera), but he gradually abandons them as the work progresses. What makes these series different from the past is that each of the twelve pitches that compose them becomes potentially generative thanks to the coordination with the factors of the multiparametric modules. As an example, if a pitch of the row is associated with a factor of the ‘groups’ line which equals ‘5’, then it should generate four more pitches according to an intervallic derivation determined by the same module in the ‘interval’ field; the corresponding factor in the ‘duration’ field will regulate the temporal flow. The understanding of the series as a motivic-thematic device is thus definitively abandoned: instead, the series becomes a generative device (a ‘matrix series’) based on the selection of specific intervals and adopted for the creation of harmonic fields (groups) of varying density. The idea of the ‘group’ intended as a structural unit summing up and organising different parameters summarises the basic principles of Nono’s previous serial procedures, including the articulation techniques of sound complexes based on alternation and articulation of sound/non-sound partition. Since it is generated starting from a pitch of the ‘basic’ tone row and is defined in its internal components on the basis of the values prearranged in the multi-parametric modules, the group recapitulates all of the possibilities that Nono had previously envisioned for the series. The group (O in the example) can be retrograded (R), inverted (I, RI), stretched, or rendered ‘out of phase’ through the double ‘positive (note)/negative (rest)’ scansion of some sounds, and even ‘linearised’ (Figure 10.9, and see De Benedictis 2004, 216 –8). Furthermore, after it has been generated, the group is usually subject to several transformations in the subsequent editorial stages before reaching the final form in which it appears in the score, where it often appears to be completely concealed and impossible to analyse without the aid of the earlier sketches. The linearisation of the group (L) refers to the development of a line that should no longer be thought of as ‘melodic’, but rather as ‘harmonic’. This switch represents one of the most interesting aspects of Nono’s final serial phase. Nono adopted this serial procedure in the fourth and last section of Sarà dolce tacere (bb. 89ff.), and he later further developed it in ‘Ha venido’. Canciones para Silvia – where the presence of the solo soprano necessarily implies a horizontal dimension of pitches – and finally in Intolleranza 1960. Beginning from Canti di vita e d’amore – where the most refined application of the ‘harmonic line’, which is to say the linearisation of the group, is achieved in the central monody ‘Djamila Boupachá’ – this technique is gradually replaced by new systems for the selection of pitches.
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1 2 3 4 5 6
1 2 3 4 5 6 6 5 4 3 2 1
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6
6 5 4 3 2
1 2 3 4 5 6
1
1 2 3 4 5 6
2
3
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Figure 10.9 Representation of the various group types obtained from the transformation of an original group
In these two latter works, the very concept of ‘series’ begins to dissolve. In one of his notebooks from 1962, Nono wrote: ‘no more complete series’ (‘Q.10’, f. 3, Archivio Luigi Nono). Indeed, the interval is gradually made independent of the twelve-factor series and becomes the generative element underpinning the formation of all the pitch classes for each sound aggregate. The interval completely replaces the pitch parameter in the organisation of musical material and becomes one of the most important structural elements of this piece. It also works as a catalyst for Nono’s eventual departure from predetermination. In Canciones a Guiomar (1963), the compositional writing is oriented towards a stratification of sound events caused by the reading of more local systems that coordinate harmonic levels often of great initial complexity that are set up beginning from a nucleus of generative pitches. But by then, serialism had become less than a trace in a compositional process free from grids and systems and driven instead by acquired automatisms that would influence Nono until his last works in the 1980s.
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Intervals are really musical ideas Stravinsky (NBC television interview with Robert Craft, 1957)
That Igor Stravinsky would eventually be attracted to serialism is not surprising, given his conviction about the role of intervals in generating musical ideas. Reacting to those who criticised his adoption of the twelvetone technique, Stravinsky once commented to Milton Babbitt, ‘There’s nothing to it; I’ve always composed with intervals.’ Babbitt later referred to this quote as ‘something of a witticism, but what it did show, much more than a witticism, was how profoundly this is an interval kind of sequence and not just a pitch-class syntax – fundamentally and centrally an interval syntax’ (Babbitt 1987b: 20, 188 n. 12). Stravinsky’s intrigue with intervallic patterns is significant in some of his earlier works – particularly in the treatment of the motivic networks that he established to support the narrative in passages of Firebird (1910) and Perséphone (1934). As I have written previously in Multiple Masks (Carr 2002), the abbreviated symmetrical form of the immortality motive from Perséphone is 4–9 [0167] in the Allen Forte pitch-class set taxonomy (its longer five-note form becomes 5–7 [01267]). By creating a symmetry among statements of the immortality motive in which the exact order of intervals is retained while producing twelve different pitch classes, Stravinsky may have unknowingly been anticipating his own serial technique in later years. He was also working – consciously or unconsciously – with a motivic technique similar to that which he previously established in the ‘Carillon’ section of Firebird, whose motive, 6–7 [012678], contains Perséphone’s immortality motive (both the five- and four-note versions) as a subset.
Cantata (1952) and Septet (1952–3) In order to set the stage for a discussion of Stravinsky’s compositional process for In memoriam Dylan Thomas, his first composition to utilise serial technique exclusively, it is useful to establish the context for his choice of the text,
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and the influence or assistance of Robert Craft on Stravinsky’s path to serialism (Craft 1992: 33–51). It was on 8 March 1952 during a motor trip to Palmdale with Craft himself and Stravinsky’s second wife, Vera, that Stravinsky said ‘that he was afraid he could no longer compose and did not know what to do. For a moment he broke down and actually wept’ (Craft 1992: 38–9). Then, Stravinsky mentioned that the Schoenberg Suite op. 29 that he had observed a few weeks prior in rehearsal and performance made a ‘powerful impression’ on him. Webern’s Quartet op. 22 also happened to be on the programme. On hearing Stravinsky’s desire ‘to learn more’, Craft suggested that Stravinsky should re-orchestrate the String Quartet (referring to Concertino (1920)). Following this advice, Stravinsky completed the re-orchestration in 1952 as Concertino for 12 Instruments (Craft 1992: 39), which would be premiered on 11 November 1952 with Stravinsky conducting the Los Angeles Chamber Symphony Orchestra. This programme also included the premiere of Cantata (1951–2), significant because the compositional techniques used in Cantata predicted those of In memoriam Dylan Thomas. In Figure 11.1, notice one of Stravinsky’s initial flirtations with serial procedures: overlapping entrances of the six-note prime (or basic) set and its variants (retrograde, inversion, and retrograde inversion) (cf. Mason 1962). This forms the basis of what I will refer to as Stravinsky’s use of ‘serial variants’, as demonstrated on a sketch page (seen in Figure 11.2), labelled ‘cancricans’ [sic] (unless otherwise noted, all sketches discussed in this chapter, are housed in the Stravinsky Collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, for whose permission to reproduce them we are grateful). This technique is predictive of one discussed later found in In memoriam Dylan Thomas and can also be seen in Three Songs from William Shakespeare, for mezzo soprano, flute, clarinet, and viola, premiered on 8 March 1954 at the Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, conducted by Craft. Some insights by Lawrence Morton about Cantata provide a reminder of the intricacies of Stravinsky’s use of the models of Bach as a basis for his own canonic structure of ‘Ricercar II’: The whole thematic material, an eleven note phrase is first made familiar by the tenor in four versions: direct, inverted, in cancrizans (backward), and retrograde inversion (backward and upside down). Then the four versions are presented in various combinations by the voice and the oboes. Separating the canons is a ritornello.
Figure 11.1 Cantata, ‘Ricercar II’, overlapping sets
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Figure 11.2 Cantata, sketch page showing serial variants
Tovey once pointed out that in formal Baroque polyphony (canons and fugues as typified by the work of Bach) the contrapuntal combinations will work automatic ally if they will work at all. This is not true of Stravinsky’s canons. He constantly alters the time values of the notes of his theme; he displaces individual notes by an octave, he employs such devices as augmentation and diminution simultaneously within a single voice in a single statement of his theme. Not one of his combin ations works automatically; each is a fresh invention, each poses a new problem and earns a new solution. In this sense, his canons are truly marvelous in their ingenu ity, whereas ingenuity is the one quality that cannot be attributed to classical Baroque polyphony. (Morton 1952)
Morton also points out the structural delineations of the choral Prelude, Interlude, and Postlude in Cantata, all of which are strophic settings of the traditional ‘Lyke-Wake Dirge’, which describes the stations of the soul as it travels to purgatory. Little did Stravinsky or Morton know that the format for Cantata would resurface in his memorial for Dylan Thomas.
Septet (1952–3) The ‘unity’ that prevails in Septet represents a continuation of Stravinsky’s approach to Cantata that is part of a new beginning of his compositional process. With this work, Stravinsky adopted Schoenberg’s idea of serialism on his own terms – Stravinsky did not make all notes equal in his adaptation of serialism as Schoenberg had done. In Paul Hume’s review of the premiere performance of Septet in the music room of Dumbarton Oaks (conducted by Stravinsky) on 24 January 1954, he refers to the ‘central germinal idea of the opening movement’ as generating the entire score
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(Hume 1954). Stravinsky used baroque forms in Septet just as he had in Octet (1919–23), which was also included on the 1954 programme together with Histoire du soldat (1918). A manuscript page of the initial row table, used as the basis of Septet, was reproduced in Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (Stravinsky and Craft 1978: plate 14). Serialism may have been so appealing to him because it enabled him to unify his melodic and harmonic ideas, just as he had endeavoured to do in Firebird.
In memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954) When Stravinsky collaborated with literary figures, his musical settings often reflected the poetic form of the text as it did with André Gide’s for Perséphone. At other times, Stravinsky would take liberties with poetic metre of the libretti, such as Jean Cocteau’s for Oedipus Rex (1926–7) or W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman’s for The Rake’s Progress (1947–51) and one by Auden discussed later in this chapter, Elegy for J.F.K. (1964). Another phase of Stravinsky’s approach to text setting would be in, as Robert Hatten described it, ‘his close musical approximations of both prosody and poetic form in his setting of Dylan Thomas’s villanelle, “Do not go gentle [into that good night]”, a poem that exists for its own music rather than as something written with musical setting in mind’ (personal correspondence, 24 May 2018). Craft recounts that Stravinsky began his setting of that villanelle in early March of the year following Thomas’s death. Stravinsky then completed the surrounding prelude and postlude later in March and in June, respectively. Perhaps he had meant to set the text as the entire piece, but then when he had scheduled the first performance for the new Monday Evening Concert series, Craft informed him that Heinrich Schütz’s Fili mi Absalom (for bass voice and four trombones) would also be on the programme. Likely inspired by the Schütz piece, Stravinsky then added the Dirge-canons for string quartet and trombones (Craft 1992: 58), and it is possible that the fact that Schütz studied with Giovanni Gabrieli may account for the antiphony between the trombones and string quartet that shows up during Stravinsky’s Dirge-canons. This is also strongly suggested by the opening rhythmic motive being the opening motive used in canzona (long – short – short), such as the one found in Canzona septimi toni for eight parts by Gabrieli from the collection Sacrae Symphoniae. In total, there are eight pages of sketches for In memoriam, one of which contains a fragment that may have been Stravinsky’s earliest musical sketch for the work (cf. Craft 1992: 59). Looking at the top right corner of
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Another notable technique using the five-note series and its variants is the manner in which Stravinsky treated the intervals – a minor third, surrounded by two minor seconds that encompass a major third. He uses these intervals as an opportunity for further painting the text and typically has one of the two minor seconds change direction to produce a descending ‘sigh’ figure.
Canticum Sacrum ad honorem Sancti Marci nominis (1955) and Threni (1957–8) Both premiered at successive Venice Biennale Festivals starting in 1956, Canticum and Threni share the distinction of being the first works in Stravinsky’s serial period to use biblical texts in Latin. Stravinsky created a musical symmetry in Canticum that reflects the architectural design of Venice’s Basilica of Saint Mark, as well as a compositional process that juxtaposed that which was familiar to Stravinsky – eighteenth-century contrapuntal textures – with that which was still new to him – twentieth-century serial techniques. In fact, Canticum was the first of his works to contain a movement based entirely on a tone row. However, diatonic passages nevertheless remain present, as does evidence of the influence of Gregorian chant. The setting of ‘Caritas’ in the third movement (bb. 116–29) serves as a microcosm of Stravinsky’s genius in combining contrapuntal models and dodecaphonic serial techniques. By using various forms of a twelve-tone row with the original (prime) form announced by the tenor on C♯ in b. 116, answered in the next bar by the trombone (prime, in augmentation) a semitone lower on C, the alto in the next bar on D (inversion), and two bars later, expanding even further upwards by semitone in the soprano line on D♯ (prime). According to Craft, the idea of separating the entries of canonic voices by a semitone in this canon was likely influenced by a similar practice of separating canonic subjects in Webern’s Variations op. 30 (Craft 1956). Webern, however, initially limited these entrances by semitone to only two voices (opening measures: A, B♭, D♭, C and B♭, B♮, D, C♯), whereas Stravinsky adds not only a third but even a fourth, designing multiple entrances circling around C♯ (first down to C, then up to D, then further up to D♯). One has only to look at a transcription of a short musical sketch – possibly in Stravinsky’s hand – catalogued at the PSS. This sketch was acquired by the PSS from the Craft collection, and it was found with the orchestral score of the aforementioned Webern Variations. This suggests that Stravinsky studied
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the Webern score closely enough to jot down the serial variants. In fact, Craft writes that when Stravinsky was in Baden-Baden and ‘a recording of Webern’s orchestra Variations was played for him, he asked to hear it three times in succession and showed more enthusiasm than I had ever seen from him about any contemporary music’ (Craft 1992: 38). What is even more remarkable is that the intervallic structure of the previously mentioned four-note motive in Webern’s Variations (A, B♭, D♭, C) coincides with the intervals produced by four of the five notes in the inversion of the theme in Stravinsky’s own analysis of In memoriam, which also resurfaces here in Canticum, as well as in Agon, and is pitch-specific with the Webern motive, then transposed up a semitone to B♭. Later in op. 30, Webern wrote several statements of this four-note motive on different pitches, starting in the Coda at b. 146, and it appears that Stravinsky circled some of these statements in his copy of the orchestral score. Christina Thoresby, in her review of Canticum, wrote that Stravinsky was overheard telling a reporter after the premiere about the importance of mathematics in relation to the piece. Thoresby also noted that ‘after hearing it repeatedly at rehearsal and in performance it seemed to one listener to blend marvelously with the mathematics and metaphysics of the great Basilica’ (Thoresby 1956). Craft seems to all but confirm the influence of Webern in ‘A Concert for Saint Mark’ for The Score in December 1956, particularly in relation to ‘the structure of a canon such as the one in “Caritas” which ends like the last movement of Webern’s Opus 31, and which resembles a canon in the Webern Variations for Orchestra in that each entrance is at the semitone’ (Craft 1956). Stravinsky also transcribed Bach’s organ work Canonic Variations on ‘Vom Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her’ (1956) for chorus and orchestra during this time. The performance forces are almost identical to those for Canticum, as it was conceived as a companion piece for the concert in which Canticum was premiered. The accompanying instrumental canons are of far greater interest than the choral element in this work, as the voices merely sing the unharmonised chorale melody.
Agon (1953–7) A microcosm of Stravinsky’s metamorphosis from neoclassicism to serialism, Agon was begun in December 1953, but its composition was interrupted by both In memoriam and Canticum before it was eventually completed on 27 April 1957. Owing to the duality of Stravinsky’s
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compositional techniques at play in Agon, it remains the clearest lens through which to see his serial method develop. Roman Vlad highlights Stravinsky’s repeated use of the same six-note series from the second dance, ‘Double Pas-de-Quatre’ (for eight female dancers, approx. bb. 81–95) (Vlad 1978: 200). Stravinsky uses the hexachord in three successive transformations, each at different pitch levels, but all based on the same intervallic patterns, and all of which utilise the set 6z44 [012569]: the flutes in b. 81, the violin in b. 84 (inverted), and the flutes in b. 93 (retrograde inversion). Disregarding the actual appearance order of the intervals in the hexachord, these three statements are an excellent example of Stravinsky’s serial treatment of a hexachordal motive in the context of a neoclassical ballet. Following Vlad’s observations, the principal motives continue in the following section (‘Triple Pas-de-Quatre’, bb. 96–121) and are ‘presented mostly in their mirror’. Allen Forte continued to analyse Stravinsky’s explorations with serial transformations in the later sections as well, particularly ‘Bransle Simple’ (bb. 278–309) and ‘Bransle Gay’ (bb. 310–35). Of special interest is the way that Stravinsky interchanges the minor ninth interval with its inversion in a short section (bb. 452–62) of the ‘Pas-de-Deux’ (complete from bb. 411–519). It is here that Stravinsky created a series involving twelve different pitches that he introduced through the sequential repetition of a given tetrachord. In addition, he created an imitative texture that enabled him to use one of his favourite baroque models as structural inspiration for his serial experimentation in Agon. Even more remarkable is the strong relationship that the intervallic design of the fugal subject has with the inverted thematic motive of In memoriam, completed during Agon’s fractured compositional period.
Threni: id est lamentationes Jeremiae prophetae (1957–8) For this work, Stravinsky was inspired by Ernst Krenek’s setting of Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae [Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah], written in the early 1940s, but not published until much later in 1957: For both composers their settings of the biblical Lamentations represents an import ant landmark in the development of their serial procedures. For Krenek it was his development of the technique of transposition rotation which he used composition ally in Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae. For Stravinsky it was that Threni was his first completely twelve note work and one in which he began to explore some of the serial procedures that were to become hallmarks of his compositions from Threni on the
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precedent for some of which can be found in the works of Krenek, Lamentatio being the first and most significant. (Hogan 1982: 22)
Among the documents at the Stravinsky archive for this work, there is one page in Stravinsky’s hand that provides four forms of one twelve-tone series. In addition, there are sixty-six pages of sketches – some of which will be discussed below in relation to Stravinsky’s compositional process – and other examples that appear elsewhere in research published by David H. Smyth and Joseph N. Straus (Smyth 2000; Straus 2001 and 1999b). In an article published in Melos, Vlad presented three of the four basic initial row forms, plus three transpositions (see Figure 11.4) (Vlad 1959: 36). For clarity, his original abbreviations appear (O, U, K, KU) along with their equivalents (P, I, R, RI, respectively). Stravinsky labels his integers using 1–12, instead of the more traditional 0–11, in both his initial row table and also when he is annotating specific passages in his musical sketches. Krenek and Vlad also used this approach, so consequently, this discussion of Threni will use the same 1–12 numbering system. Vlad was invited to write the programme notes for the premiere, and both those and his later observations add a special dimension to the context
Figure 11.4 Vlad’s chart of various forms of Threni row
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(bb. 14–15, sounding G, G♯, D♯) and in the English horn (bb. 17–18, the last three notes of R4, sounding E, F, C). These three-note cadential patterns help to unify the conclusion of this introductory section that ends in b. 18. The technique also prefigures Stravinsky’s reordering of rows by the displacement of three-note patterns from the end to the beginning so that the order of pitches reads 10–12 followed by 1–9. This can be seen in the unbarred four-part vocal canon in b. 189 and is also noted in red pencil by Stravinsky on the corresponding sketch page for this section. Also found there is a rhythmic discrepancy – he doubles the durations from crotchets in the sketch to minims in the published score. Perhaps this was to make this unmetered section appear closer to the centuries-old settings of Latin masses, and also to emphasise the syllabic rhythm of the Latin text ‘Re/cor/ da/re pau/per/ta/tis [remember poverty]’ (slashes indicate syllables). Stravinsky also provides a helpful guide for the analysis of this phrase by writing ‘RI’ in a box next to the Bass I entrance. Above that on the sketch page, Stravinsky writes the canonic imitation of Bass I for Tenor I (RI11). For the remaining voices of the canon in the published score, Stravinsky then uses RI10 starting in the original order of 1–3 (D♯, E, A) for Basso II and imitated in Tenor II in the same original order (B♭, B, E). The interesting phenomenon is that the intervals of this (0,1,6) trichord are prominent throughout the various forms or variants of the row for Threni and resounds as the main musical idea for this work (Vlad 1978: 212). Clare Hogan concludes: In many ways Threni can be viewed as an exploration of what were, and continued to develop as, characteristically Stravinskian serial techniques. The overall formal structure is basically determined by the text within which Stravinsky’s serialism operates. As is true of some of the movements of Canticum Sacrum and Agon, purely musical points of reference are often created by the predominance of the prime forms of the series, and the transpositions throughout the work are frequently limited for the purpose of exploiting similarities between rows and row segments. (Hogan 1982: 23 4)
In the 30 September 1958 European (Rome) edition of the of The New York Herald Tribune, Peter Dragadze wrote: ‘Threni’ is a vast work lasting some 35 minutes, in which Stravinsky without any hesitation completely abandoned himself to a pure serial dodecaphonic technique of composition familiar to us through the Webern and Schoenberg schools, but bound together with that infallible ‘scientific’ genius which has allowed Stravinsky, and only Stravinsky, to produce in 1958 a musical conception already considered démodé by leading contemporary musicians.
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Movements for Piano and Orchestra (1958–9) In a letter of 8 May 1958 addressed to Paul Fromm (of the Paul Fromm Music Foundation in Chicago), Robert Craft wrote: Mr. Stravinsky went out to Krenek’s for dinner the other day and I am happy to say that those two composers now get on very well. Stravinsky is really very fond of Krenek, respects him enormously, and is really glad to learn the kind of things that everybody can learn from Krenek. Krenek also couldn’t have been nicer. (Ernst Krenek Insitut, Krems)
While it is true that this meeting with Krenek coincides with the time that Stravinsky was working on Movements, it cannot be assumed that this was on the agenda during their meeting, though one sketch page contains an annotation in handwriting that seems to not be that of Stravinsky. In December of that same year – when Stravinsky was in New York to conduct the city’s premiere of Threni – Stravinsky spoke with great enthusiasm to Milton Babbitt and Claudio Spies about his compositional process for Movements and showed them ‘all of his notes, alphanumerical as well as musical, pertaining to the Movements . . . and proceeded, as if to restore for himself and convey to us his original, unsullied (by actual, approximate performance) image of his creation, a creation that clearly meant crucially much to him’ (Babbitt 1987a: 16). The materials that Stravinsky showed to Babbitt and Spies during this meeting in New York are almost definitely among the numerous manuscripts and other documents at the Stravinsky Archive. Included in that collection are two pages of row tables, and fifty-four pages of sketches in Stravinsky’s hand, making it possible to observe Stravinsky’s early (if not earliest) examples of constructing rotational arrays based on hexachords created for Movements. Exactly where Stravinsky’s compositional process began for this work is difficult to say, though from some of his musical sketches, it is likely that he was thinking of a network of motivic ideas based on a series of intervals that provided him with the most possibilities, particularly those that included tritones. The opening two bars of Movements are based on two hexachords at the top of the table, shown in Figure 11.6. Stravinsky disperses the pitches of the first hexachord among various instruments simultaneously – flute, trumpet, violins, and piano – whereas the pitches of the second hexachord are confined to the piano. The instrumentation of the first hexachord is suggestive of the artistic technique of pointillism (see Carr 2014: 144–5). The succession of intervals and pitches of hexachord Oβ is the same as
Stravinsky’s Path to Serialism
Figure 11.6 Movements, original (prime) row, split into hexachords α and β
those of the inversion at β (I3). Hexachords Oα and Oβ share the same three tritones and would be categorised as 6–7: [012678]. More fascinating is the outcome of Stravinsky’s application of hexachordal rotation to Oβ (hexachord 6–7, see Figure 11.7) that yields pitch specific replications under inversion (in different sequence) – evidence of the symmetry of the original intervallic profile of hexachord 6–7. Stravinsky has left several musical sketches that help to explain his compositional process for Movements – one among them that shows Stravinsky’s experimentation with various transpositions of hexachord β – primarily in inversion of V that is labelled by Stravinsky as ‘Riv V’. He also uses other forms of this series, as he formulates his ideas for the section beginning at b. 27. It is possible to observe how he used compound intervals to enable pitches of a given motive to move between different instruments. Rather, it seems possible that Stravinsky was inspired by Webern, not only through an apparent close study of Webern’s transcription of the ‘Ricercar’ of Bach’s Musical Offering among Stravinsky’s notations at the Stravinsky archive, but also through his close association with Robert Craft. In the sketch titled the ‘1st Interlude’ – the title did not carry over into the published score, though the music does as bb. 43–5 – Stravinsky indicated two hexachords: one of them the Retrograde of Oβ (Riv. β on the sketch) and the other the Retrograde of the Inversion of Oα (Riv. Inv–α on the sketch), transposed down a minor third and reordered. Both the handwriting and authorship thereof are unclear; they may, in fact, be Krenek’s annotations on Stravinsky’s music. Stravinsky’s next level of sketching for this ‘interlude’ adds barlines (though these are also changed in the published score) and instrumentation. Stravinsky’s handwritten numbers from the previous sketch mentioned above also remain. The outcome at the foreground level is linear, which could justify Stravinsky’s poetic licence to change the order of pitches in the hexachord – in fact, Massimiliano Locanto, in his analysis of this same sketch, justified the reordering of pitches on the basis of the vertical function of the intervals (ic5) (Locanto 2009: 242). Stravinsky eventually returns to one of his traditional techniques – block form – in what is initially called ‘4th Interlude’
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Figure 11.7 Movements, diplomatic transcription of sketch page, annotated with rotation of hexachord 6 7
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(bb. 137–40 in the published score). Whereas he freely moved the hexachords between instruments in the ‘1st Interlude’ in a Webern-esque fashion, he now restricts melodic hexachord statements to individual instruments. Movements represents a turning point in Stravinsky’s serial compositional process. In a review of the world premiere in the New York Herald Tribune (11 January 1960), conducted by Stravinsky at Town Hall in New York City, Jay S. Harrison wrote: Igor Stravinsky, in his Movements for Piano and Orchestra has reached a point of no return . . . The work . . . is the most radical of his career, and is by implication, one of the most extreme therefore in the whole history of music. It pursues the course undertaken by the composer upon his acceptance of the 12 tone technique, with the significant difference that in his latest piece, he has by passed all of his predecessors much as he did many years ago with the first performance of Le Sacre du Printemps.
A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer (1960–1) Whereas Threni was written using Latin texts from the Old Testament, the first two of the three movements of Sermon are from the New Testament and now in English: (1) a sermon from the epistles of St Paul; (2) the stoning of St Stephen (from the Acts of the Apostles); (3) a setting of poetry by Thomas Dekker. Given the uncertainties that occur in human life throughout history, particularly in times of war, disaster, and plague, the belief that humanity is saved by faith and hope becomes a source of consolation. Though it uses the Christian Bible as a lens, the spirit of universality is reflected throughout the piece. In his article ‘Stravinsky’s New Work’, written in anticipation of the premiere of the work in Basel, with Paul Sacher conducting on 23 February 1962, Colin Mason put the piece in perspective with Stravinsky’s other works as follows: Conforming to the pattern of Stravinsky’s works in recent years, it is musically (and serially) easier to come to grips with than his most recent instrumental work, Movements. All four forms of the basic 12 note series are used thematically throughout, and the vocal writing is in the euphonious contrapuntal style of the canons in Threni. (Mason 1961: 5)
The design of the twelve-note series for A Sermon is highly intervallic in nature, and one is immediately struck by Stravinsky’s abiding interest in the ordering of these intervals – in this case, the opening instrumental
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prelude (bb. 1–11) foreshadows the poetic meaning of the text that appears in the next section. Following the analytical insights of Colin Mason, the annotations on the score of this prelude indicate two statements of the twelve-note series by the bass flute, a segment of the row in retrograde inversion and then a statement of the retrograde by the bass clarinet. Looking further at the series apart from the score, there is evidence that Stravinsky reordered intervals to echo the intervallic patterns that he used elsewhere when he was negotiating similar patterns from In memoriam Dylan Thomas (Mason 1961: 6). Other possibilities are that the influence of the motives in Webern’s Variations op. 30 and Agon were still reverberating in Stravinsky’s musical imagination. In his book Stravinsky, Roman Vlad reminds us of comments that Stravinsky made in conversation with Craft, having to do with the connection between chromaticism and pathos. About this, Vlad writes, ‘The quality of pathos in the cantata is that of a work in which the ultimate experience of human life is distilled’ (Vlad 1978: 231).
Variations: Aldous Huxley in memoriam (1963–4) Containing just 141 bars of music, Stravinsky’s Variations for orchestra lasts slightly over five minutes, yet contains a web of complex serial techniques. Without question, while endeavouring to incorporate his own voice into his compositional process for Variations, Stravinsky benefited from his associations with Krenek, Babbitt, and Spies, while downplaying the work of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Stravinsky’s approach to serialism in Variations strays from formulaic construction, incorporating short musical blocks that expand, following traditional variation technique. In at least one case, he even follows the model of a Bach fugue. Among his many manuscript pages for this piece, several larger ones are meticulously constructed and also heavily annotated in order to identify the occurrence of each row segment. It is not, however, readily apparent who wrote in the annotations to label the occurrences of the row forms in multiple colours in order to track the serial construction. An exemplary point of baroque and twelve-tone juxtaposition involves his labelling of ‘fugato’ found on the manuscript page corresponding with b. 101. This is immediately preceded by a vertical hexachord distributed in the low strings, bassoons, trombones, and horns in bb. 99–100. Merely looking at these few bars, and indeed, virtually any part of the score, it appears that
Stravinsky’s Path to Serialism
Stravinsky’s penchant for block form – hearkening back to the Rite of Spring – continues to play out in Variations, just as it will in his Introitus: T.S. Eliot in memoriam (1965).
Abraham and Isaac (1962–3) and Elegy for J.F.K. (1964) Both of these works demonstrate Stravinsky’s penchant for versification and also happened to be programmed together at a performance on 6 December 1964 at Philharmonic Hall in New York City. The premiere of Abraham and Isaac, the text of which is in Hebrew, had been given six months prior (23 August) in Jerusalem, Israel, and Stravinsky’s preoccupation with syllabification was evident enough that even the review by Moshe Brilliant noted it, quoting Stravinsky as saying that he had ‘studied every syllable of the Hebrew text with the aid of scholars and composed the work accordingly’ and that ‘it could not be sung in any other language’ (Brilliant 1964). Details of the collaboration for Elegy for J.F.K. can be examined in correspondence at the Paul Sacher Stiftung. With an explanation for the syllabic structure of his text, W. H. Auden wrote to Stravinsky and explained that he wrote the text in the poetic form of haiku, so that though the number of syllables in individual lines might vary, the total syllable count in each stanza would always remain at seventeen. It is debatable whether or not Auden’s specific use of haiku had an effect on Stravinsky’s compositional process for Elegy. His primitive ideas were written in a pocket-sized sketchbook that Craft said Stravinsky carried around in the last years of his life. It would appear that Stravinsky first set the last line of the first verse (‘The Heavens are silent’) to an oscillating two-note pattern that had occurred to him while on a flight from Los Angeles to Cleveland. He commented on this to a reporter from the New York Times, in an interview published on 6 December 1964, when asked about composing Elegy: ‘Melodic ideas came to me immediately, but the first phrase I was certain would never come unglued.’ Stravinsky considered those two oscillating notes as a ‘melodic-rhythmic stutter’. It is uncertain if he used scansion marks in his text analysis, as his setting of the text is, for the most part, straightforwardly syllabic. Both works use serial techniques, though these are more pervasive in Abraham and Isaac. For this work, there exists a musical score partially annotated by Stravinsky himself, at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, demonstrating, for instance, his unique ordering of the notes for the hexachord in
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Stravinsky’s Path to Serialism incidentally, the violin part first, and then the piano.’ The reporter then asked Stravinsky, ‘Would you describe the music as “12 tone”?’ Stravinsky responded, ‘I wouldn’t though a series is employed. The label tells you nothing; we have no organon any more and card carrying 12 toners are practically extinct. Originally, a series, or row (the horizontal emphasis of that word!) was a gravitational substitute and a consistently exploited basis of a composition, but now it is seldom more than a point of departure. A serial autopsy of the “Elegy” would hardly be worth the undertaking, in any case, and the only light that I can throw on the question of method is to say that I had already joined the various melodic fragments before finding the possi bilities of serial combination inherent in them which is why the vocal part could begin with the inverted order and the clarinet with the reverse order that is, because the series had been discovered elsewhere in the piece. There is virtually no element of predetermination in such a procedure.
Introitus: T.S. Eliot in memoriam (1965) Stravinsky’s use of block form as a compositional technique continued to evolve over the next two decades, and, when T. S. Eliot passed away in 1965, Stravinsky responded that same year by writing Introitus: T.S. Eliot in memoriam, a deeply expressive work of grief upon the loss of his friend, featuring once again a male chorus. This work is illustrative of Stravinsky’s use of serialism for expressive purposes; the combination of twelve-tone technique and the unusual instrumentation creates a heartwrenching effect. Stravinsky writes that: ‘The only novelty in serial treatment is in chord structure – the chant is punctuated by fragments of a chordal dirge’ (Stravinsky 1982: 66). This results in a texture that echoes the use of harmonic stasis as accompaniment to chant-like melodies. A performance of Introitus by the choir of Westminster Abbey was part of the ‘Homage to T.S. Eliot’ that took place at the Globe Theatre in London on 13 June 1965. The first page of the sketch score, found at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, shows the evolution of his compositional process with sound blocks, the distinctive and regularly recurring ‘chordal dirge’ that is a trademark of the work. The combination of percussion instruments that Stravinsky used in Introitus serves as an evolutionary extension of the ritualistic profile that defines the Rite, while simultaneously reflecting the influence of the Rite on his process for an intensely personal epitaph.
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Requiem Canticles (1965–6) Requiem Canticles (1965–6) was commissioned by Princeton University in honour of a major benefactor in 1965, and Claudio Spies was instrumental in coordinating the details of the first performance at Princeton in 1966. Documents in the Claudio Spies collection at the Library of Congress confirm that he was in close communication with both Craft and Stravinsky concerning the serial analysis of the work, and he published a detailed analysis the following year, illuminating both the inter- and intra-symmetry of its nine sections. It is notable that many of Stravinsky’s serial compositions are emotionally charged works. Though it was a serial composition, the chromatic beauty of Stravinsky’s interval-based writing is still plainly audible. Spies notes as much, saying that the ‘Lacrimosa’, of all the movements, is the ‘most meticulously and ingeniously organized’, and that it is ‘a paragon in this serene and deeply moving composition’ (Spies 1967: 120–1). Stravinsky himself would pass away just five years after the premiere of Requiem Canticles. A performance of this work, conducted by Craft, at San Giovanni e Paolo in Venice before the composer’s body was taken to its final resting place at San Michele, made for a fitting musical epitaph. Requiem Canticles is written in the same Stravinskian language as his prior works, merely using a different vocabulary, tying together elements of all his stylistic periods and all of his characteristic instrumental and choral tendencies into a singular work of great brevity, yet packed with religious piety and intense emotion.
part iii
Geographies
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Serialism in Western Europe mark delaere
Preliminaries In 1924, one year after Arnold Schoenberg finished composing his first work entirely based on twelve-tone technique (Suite for Piano op. 25, 1921–3), Erwin Stein presented the main principles of this method in an article for the leading avant-garde periodical Musikblätter des Anbruch, in an issue celebrating the fiftieth birthday of his former teacher (Stein 1924). Following Schoenberg’s and his circle’s claim that the newly invented method reduced free atonality to a mere transitionary phenomenon, critics and composers alike started to equate atonality with dodecaphony from that moment onwards. Whereas Schoenberg believed that his invention would ensure the predominance of German music for the next fifty years, in practice he lost a great deal of external support for atonality now understood as ‘constructivist’ dodecaphony. Béla Bartók, not the least of his fellow modernist composers, is a case in point. In an essay written in 1920, Bartók begins with the statement that the music of our time has resolutely moved in the direction of atonality; by 1927, he rejects the now contaminated concept of atonality (Bartók 1920; Becker 1927). For composers undeterred by twelve-tone works and their critical reception, getting to know the intricacies and aesthetic potential of the method was not that easy. Schoenberg had moved to the United States after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, hardly a decade after Stein’s article. Alban Berg had died in 1935, another protagonist of serial music Ernst Krenek had fled to America in 1938, and the cultural and political climate leading to the Second World War, the hardships of that war, and its aftermath turned the period between 1933 and 1947 into a time during which it was difficult to get first-hand knowledge of serialism and sometimes even dangerous to put it into practice. In view of this, it comes as no surprise that twenty or more years had to pass before twelve-tone techniques were adopted in Western Europe outside of the Viennese circle. Examples from Italy, Belgium, and the United Kingdom suffice to make the point. The very first Italian dodecaphonic For reading and commenting on the draft version of this chapter, I thank Martin Iddon, Gianmario Borio, Max Erwin, Pascal Decroupet, and Maarten Quanten.
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piece was the Serenata (1941–2) by Camillo Togni (Rizzardi 2011, 46), soon to be followed by Luigi Dallapiccola’s Cinque Frammenti di Saffo (1942–3) and the penetrating opera Il prigioniero (1944–8). In Belgium, Louis De Meester’s Variations for 2 Pianos (1947) and Pierre Froidebise’s chamber cantata Amercoeur (1948) were the earliest examples, before Norbert Rosseau would create a more substantial body of twelve-tone works between 1949 and 1975 (Delaere 1998: 15–22). Elisabeth Lutyens is considered to be the first composer of serial music in the United Kingdom, exploring its techniques progressively from the Chamber Concerto op. 8.1 in 1939 to the Motet, based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in 1953 (Rupprecht 2017: 39–47). Philip Rupprecht recalls Lutyens’s self-analysis of her historical position: ‘[I had an] odd experience in the late 1950s: until then I was regarded as too modern to be played, then overnight I was an old “fuddyduddy”’ (Rupprecht 2017: 39). She was not the only composer to fall victim of such criticism. By the early 1950s, Schoenberg was proclaimed dead as a role model for the younger generation, and his opera Moses und Aron (1932) was decried as ‘serial Verdi’ (Boulez 1966a; Goeyvaerts 1994: 46). These and similar descriptions can be partly explained by the generation gap, but they assuredly also stem from young composers’ disappointment that Schoenberg had failed to develop serial technique since he left Europe in 1933. They perceived Schoenberg’s intention to base thematic-motivic development and traditional musical forms on the tone row as a misjudgement of the row’s potential to create emphatically new music. From that moment around 1950 onwards, ‘serialism’ came to be understood as ‘multiple serialism’, as distinct from more traditional dodecaphonic procedures. This chapter offers a broad and necessarily incomplete overview of serialism thus redefined and practised in Western Europe between 1950 and 1975, specifically excluding those protagonists who have separate chapters in this volume devoted to their individual practices. The end date is motivated by the development of spectral music in France, the widespread reception of minimal music in Europe – both events challenging serialism as the only avant-garde musical movement up to then in Europe – and the emergence of postmodernism – challenging the very idea of an avant-garde – around that time.
Origins Any account of the history of European serial music focuses on a twofold origin: the (dodecaphonic) music of Anton Webern and the teaching and compositions of Olivier Messiaen. Key themes in the narrative around
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Webern’s twin role as a source of inspiration and as the historical legitimation of serialism include a structuralist instead of thematic approach to the tone row, the creation of (unique) musical forms derived from the row, the importance of symmetry and reduction, the first attempts at extending the serial principle to other sound dimensions, and more generally an emphasis on sonority, all of which are opposed to Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic practice. The 1953 New Music Courses in Darmstadt offered Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Karel Goeyvaerts, and Luigi Nono the opportunity to pointedly discuss Webern’s importance for their own work. Their statements and analyses were presented in radio programmes and published in journals such as Die Reihe, all contributing to the establishment of the image of Webern as the forefather of serial music. The second origin invariably invoked is Messiaen’s analysis class at the Paris Conservatoire. The list of enrolled students includes protagonists of the earliest generation of serialists such as Boulez, Michel Fano, Jean Barraqué, Goeyvaerts, and Stockhausen. Messiaen explained to them that music could be conceived starting from parameters of sound other than pitch, such as rhythm or tone colour (see Delaere 2002). The creative leap realised by these youngsters was, then, to combine Webern’s serial techniques and aesthetics with Messiaen’s parametric thinking, so the story goes. In spite of rebuttals, such as Richard Toop’s, made as early as 1974 (Toop 1974), histories of twentieth-century music continue to mention Messiaen’s ‘Mode de valeurs et d’intensités’ (1949) from the Quatre Études de rythme for piano as a catalyst or even first example of serial music, even though it is obviously a work based on a modal scale with tones empirically selected, rather than a series with a fixed order of non-repeated tones. It is remarkable that the final movement ‘Île de feu 2’ (1950) from the same collection has hitherto gone unnoticed as a better candidate to fulfil the historical position ascribed to ‘Mode’ (Figures 12.1a and b). Messiaen starts from an ascending chromatic scale from C to B and a descending durational scale from to . Each pitch–rhythm combination has a fixed articulation and intensity, as was the case in ‘Mode’. By contrast with the latter, however, ‘Île de feu 2’ has sections in which the scale is systematically permutated, following a matrix that starts from the middle and moves to the outer values: 7 – 6 – 8 – 5 – 9 – 4 – 10 – 3 – 11 – 2 – 12 – 1. This matrix yields ten different permutations, in the end returning to the original order, hence a cyclical permutation process (Messiaen 1994–2004, iii, 165–7). Five sections in the piano work entirely consist of a combination of two permutations, one in each hand. The layout of the scale and matrix results in distinctive patterns, with permutation 1
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presenting an all-interval series in open fan form, permutation 2 a succession of augmented fourths, permutation 3 a succession of minor thirds, with permutations 2 and 3 having increasing intervals linking the main interval. Stockhausen and Goeyvaerts were particularly struck by the ‘punctual’ style of the ‘Mode’ when they first heard a recording of the piece in Darmstadt in 1951 (Goeyvaerts 1994: 45–6). They would soon develop strategies comparable to those Messiaen applied to the ‘Mode’: precomposition (drawing up an inventory of the musical material); starting from absolute values (rather than, for instance in the domain of rhythm, from the subdivision of a metrical unit); and involving four parameters in the set-up. Unlike the ‘Mode’, however, the five permutation sections from ‘Île de feu 2’ present an equal distribution of the absolute values and have a matrix which regulates their order. Why then did the young serialists and subsequent literature fail to appreciate the eminently serial nature of this work and mistakenly invoke the ‘Mode’ as precursor or first example of European serial music? The answer to that question lies in the other sections of ‘Île de feu 2’, which are inspired by Messiaen’s notion of Papua New Guinea’s folk music (see the tempo indication ‘Vif et féroce’). These other sections gain in importance, increasingly flooding the abstract serial islets with wild, virtuosic, hammered, ostinato-based Bartókian waves. It is often overlooked that other, arguably less decisive but certainly more surprising, sources of inspiration than Webern and Messiaen had an impact on the establishment of serialism. Paul Hindemith’s ‘Reihe 2’ from his textbook Unterweisung im Tonsatz served as a model for Bruno Maderna’s and Luigi Nono’s attempt to determine the degree of relative tension (and thus the expressive value) of the intervals defined in the series. Once again, a productive misunderstanding steers the course of music history: Hindemith’s diatonicised chromaticism signals a return to tonal principles rather than the foundation stone of twelve-tone music it was mistaken for by the Italian composers. Moreover, Nono did not share the disrespect for Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic music expressed by his fellow serialists. Even before marrying Schoenberg’s daughter Nuria in 1955, Nono had based his Variazione canoniche for orchestra (1950) on the series of the Ode to Napoleon op. 41. Likewise, the composers of A Survivor from Warsaw op. 46 and Il canto sospeso can certainly be considered kindred spirits. Finally, Nono made an in-depth analysis of his father-in-law’s dodecaphonic masterpiece, the Variations for Orchestra op. 31 in 1956 (Emmery 2019). Boulez had declared Schoenberg dead, but Stravinsky was there to stay for him, at least Stravinsky up until 1920. A comparison of Boulez’s and Messiaen’s analyses
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of The Rite of Spring (1913) shows to what extent Boulez interpreted Stravinsky through his teacher’s lens, but also how foundational the Russian composer was for the emergence of the serial idea (Boulez 1966b; Messiaen 1994–2004, ii, 91–147). Also, one should not forget the importance of Claude Debussy’s music for conceptions of form developed within serialism. Stockhausen significantly entitled his essay on statistical form and group composition ‘From Webern to Debussy’, including analytical observations on Jeux, the cult work in these circles (Stockhausen 1963f). Barraqué’s keen analytical studies on Debussy say as much about his own composition of musical form as a ceaseless becoming (‘devenir’) as they do about his predecessor (Barraqué 1962; Barraqué 2001). Both the Italian serialists and Goeyvaerts had intimate knowledge of medieval and Renaissance music, in which they either uncovered or projected parallels with serial practice (Drees 2003; Goeyvaerts 2010a). Finally, Pascal Decroupet has convincingly shown that the self-declared distance of serial composers from musique concrète can hardly obliterate the common ground they share with Pierre Schaeffer’s method of transforming and layering acoustic data, in addition to providing composers such as Boulez, Messiaen, Michel Philippot, Barraqué, Fano, and Stockhausen their first hands-on practical experiences in an electro-acoustic music studio (Decroupet 2011).
Geographies In presenting some of the main composers by country, this chapter follows the geographical perspective on the history of serial music taken within this part of the volume. In doing so, one has nevertheless to keep in mind that European serial music as defined in this chapter was arguably the most international movement there has ever been in music. The Darmstadt New Music Courses were the most important international gathering place (see Borio and Danuser 1997 and Iddon 2013), but serialists also met at music festivals such as Donaueschingen and at radio stations, especially when they hosted an electro-acoustic music studio, as in Paris, Cologne, or Milan. Composers showed and discussed their scores with colleagues from abroad during these gatherings, and the main protagonists engaged in intensive correspondence with their peers. The dedicated periodical Die Reihe had an international authorship (see Grant 2001). Building a new language and aesthetics from scratch necessitated extensive international contacts, which were undoubtedly also fuelled by the post-war aversion to the nationalist ideologies that had led to the catastrophe of the Second World War.
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France, and more specifically Paris, proved to be once again the birthplace of an ars nova, that of European serialism. In addition to Messiaen’s analysis class, the teachings of René Leibowitz during the mid-1940s and his subsequent publications were influential in this respect. Leibowitz initiated the new generation of French composers into dodecaphonic techniques, while at the same time unintentionally creating considerable distance from the aesthetics of the Second Viennese School. Boulez undoubtedly was the strongest artistic personality among the youngsters, but it would be a mistake to narrow serialism in France to his oeuvre. Many other composers, such as Barraqué, Fano, Philippot, Gilbert Amy, or Jean-Claude Éloy, used serial techniques as well and added practices and expressivities of their own to the general picture of serialism. This is certainly true for Barraqué, who, in addition to numerous incomplete or unacknowledged scores, produced six very substantial works during his short life (see Henrich 1997). In spite of serialism’s inherent tendency towards fragmentation, Barraqué sought to overcome the short, Webern-like condensed formal types to create vast architectural forms of considerable duration. His Piano Sonata (1950–2) is a case in point. The score mentions a duration of approximately forty minutes, but performances aiming to realise the desired clarity and expressivity generally run to fifty minutes or more. Two sections follow each other without interruption, the first alternating four fast, the second four slow tempi. Metronome markings are lacking altogether, indicating that the eight degrees of speed are merely relative to another (which explains the divergent performance timings). In addition, Barraqué distinguishes between a ‘free style’ at the beginning of the work and a more ‘rigid style’ later on, in which tempi and dynamics are to be observed strictly, yielding (mostly two-part) contrapuntal textures of points and lines. Beethoven and Debussy are often invoked when dealing with Barraqué’s concept of musical form. In principle, these two formal models seem incompatible, but Barraqué succeeds in combining large-scale dimensions with flexible formal functions resulting from the interpenetration of loose and tight textures. In other words, Barraqué creates a compelling musical form of vast dimensions through a succession of unstable and highly contrasting fragments. Paul Griffiths speaks, in an imagined conversation with the deceased composer, as follows: Your aim, though, was not anarchy but a higher, more truthful complexity, and the Sonata is music of chords and arpeggiations in conditions of turmoil and strain, creating possibilities of development, of flow, of progression (and of frustration) that have rarely been found in post tonal music. (Griffiths 2003: 42)
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Together with this specific formal concept (and in a way resulting from it), the dramatic intensity created by the rapid alternation of short rhythmic cells and extreme registers and dynamics constitutes Barraqué’s individual contribution to the history of serial music. From 1956 onwards, he directed this artistic programme towards the realisation of a ‘super-work’ based on Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil (1945). Some parts of this envisaged magnum opus such as the cantatas Le Temps Restitué (1956–68) and . . . au delà du hasard (1958–9) were completed. Others were left unfinished. After having attended Messiaen’s analysis class and established a personal and musical relationship with Barraqué and Boulez, Fano rejected his juvenilia and participated in the development of multiple serialism. This resulted in two works only, but their sheer quality and early historic position justify Fano’s place in the canon of European serialism. His Sonata for 2 Pianos (1952) was first discussed by Richard Toop, who interpreted this work as the missing link between Messiaen’s ‘Mode’ and Boulez’s Structures I (Toop 1974). More recently, a detailed analysis of the Sonata’s serial organisation of pitch, register, duration, and dynamics has demonstrated that in spite of some technical resemblances, Fano’s two-piano work distinguishes itself from Boulez’s ‘automatic writing’ in creating musical phrases that allow for the perception of a distinct musical form (Leleu and Decroupet 2011). Fano’s Étude for 15 Instruments (1952) was long considered lost until, in 2019, Max Erwin produced a transcript of this seminal work. The opening page shown in Figure 12.2, which I reproduce with gratitude to both Fano and Erwin, shows the ‘punctual style’ typical of the earliest phase in serial composition. There is a strong tendency towards Webernian ‘organic chromaticism’ (Pousseur 1955), the simultaneous or successive sounding of a pitch with one of its chromatic neighbours. The careful elaboration of the tone and rest durations is obvious, as is the punctual characterisation of degrees of loudness. Compared to the Sonata, modes of attack and sound colour are now included in the serial organisation as well. It is obvious from the large number of works for solo or two pianos that serial composers initially eschewed the serial manipulation of the least controllable sound parameter. Indeed, the composition of timbre is arguably the most remarkable aspect from the Étude. As can be seen from its opening page, this work is not ‘for 15 instruments’ at all but rather ‘for 15 families of timbres’. Most of the string and brass instruments have muted and unmuted family members. Instrumental timbres are subtly modified either during the attack or sustain phase (see for instance the viola and violin entries, respectively the piccolo clarinet and saxophone, or the horns–clarinet–trumpet timbre shifts), thus betraying an acquaintance with technical procedures from Pierre Schaeffer’s electro-acoustic music studio.
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What if you just missed the pioneering years of serialism because you were born ten years later than the main protagonists? Gilbert Amy confirms the recurrent music historical phenomenon that priority is not the main issue, even in a period obsessed with ideas of progress and anxiety of influence. In works such as Antiphonies (1960–3) and Diaphonies (1962), his experience as orchestral conductor allowed him to elaborate upon the writing for spatially distributed orchestral groups explored in Stockhausen’s Gruppen (1955–7). During the 1960s and 1970s, Amy produced a number of works that are closely related to Boulez’s mobile form (and his Third Piano Sonata from 1955–7 in particular), but which add distinctive characteristics of his own. Jeux for one to four oboists (1970) is a good example. Its main title refers to a proclaimed forefather of serialism (Debussy), and its subtitles reflect (‘Trope’) or seemingly anticipate (‘Répons’) works by Boulez. Compared to Boulez, Amy leaves slightly more options for the interpreters to assemble the different components of the piece (see Michel 2011). Both in time and in place, Belgium acted as a pivot in the history of Western European serialism. Together with Boulez – albeit completely differently – Goeyvaerts was the first to combine Messiaen’s teachings with Webern’s serial procedures in the middle movements of his Nr. 1 Sonata for Two Pianos (1950–1). He presented the results during the 1951 Darmstadt New Music Courses to the participants of a seminar conducted by a perplexed Theodor W. Adorno. Stockhausen was intrigued by the Belgian’s musical ideas, to the extent that he too wanted to move immediately to Paris in order to attend Messiaen’s analysis class. The ensuing extensive correspondence between the two young composers displays a bewildering mixture of topics including compositional procedures, issues with performances, electro-acoustic music technology, Neoplatonic aesthetics, dogmatic Catholic faith, and personal emotional outbursts (Misch and Delaere 2017). An occasional slip of the pen notwithstanding, Goeyvaerts put his concept of the ‘synthetic number’, the addition of four parametrical values yielding the ‘perfect number seven’ for each and every sound, into practice in the Sonata’s middle movements. While the Sonata’s outer movements have a less strict organisation and contain hints of traditional harmonic and expressive gestures, Goeyvaerts’s Nr. 2 for 13 Instruments, composed between August and September 1951, has a strong case for being said to be the first entirely serial work in Europe. Symmetry is a guiding principle in these and the following serial works, together with equal distribution of the musical material. By contrast, serial order is not important to him. The consistent use of octave doublings to mark the symmetry axis of Nr. 2 is another example of the idiosyncrasies of his mode
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of approaching serialism. In the ensuing works, the musical texture is reduced to a bare minimum. In Nr. 3 with bowed and struck tones (1952) each sound is followed by a pause, and in Nr. 4 with dead tones from the same year, four electronic sound complexes are invariably repeated, and the duration of the pauses between them are varied according to a serial scheme, creating a ‘phase-shifting’ process avant la lettre. From this moment onwards, electro-acoustic music was the only true form of serialism for Goeyvaerts. His Nr. 5 with pure tones (1953) attempts to include timbre in the serial fabric. On the whole, Goeyvaerts is arguably the most radical serialist, less inclined to compromise in his relentless effort to create ‘pure’ music, as he wrote to Stockhausen on 4 August 1953: While you could change all of your works even after they were finished, I was not permitted to. So your music will always sound sweeter, and also more human. It also belongs to you more. Nothing belongs to me. . . . You were then able to write Kontra Punkte. For me it became Nr. 4 with dead tones, an inhuman, relentless piece, but it fascinates me in all its purity. Then you said that I was retreating from the human world more and more, and that I was losing all contact with people. I cannot help that. But I feel very afraid in the process. (Misch and Delaere 2017: 339 40)
While Goeyvaerts would eventually acknowledge the discrepancy between conceived and perceived musical structures after hearing the, to him disappointing, results of the studio production of Nr. 5, such a discrepancy was no concern at all for Herman Van San. Based on the first complete study of the archival material, Max Erwin (2019) arrives at a work list of fourteen extant compositions from the period 1948 to 1958. The succession shows a development from mainstream dodecaphonic techniques to the serialisation of – ultimately – all parameters by way of an identical mathematical formula, a principle called ‘isomorphy’ by Van San. The electro-acoustic music Geometrische Patterns (1956), alternatively entitled ‘Secundum Opus Electronicum Mathematicum’ is his last completed score. After that and until 1972, he conceived other electro-acoustic works, apparently without the intention to complete or to realise them. The sketches consist of mathematical equations, algorithms and theories from physics, chemistry and cybernetics only: ‘Yet the fact that Van San did not even care to pursue a realisation, however unlikely, of such theories, suggests that he intended his work to exist in a theoretical form, and that these compositions – if compositions they are – will remain in their current state as nearly indecipherable equations’ (Erwin 2019: 199). In a series of articles, Van San construed a teleological historical narrative from Schoenberg’s atonality to ‘mathematic serialism’ and ‘cybernetic music’.
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His self-construction as a pioneering composer at the culminating point of this development is not only misleading because of the consistent backdating of all of his manuscripts. By being the only serial composer not interested in how his music sounds, Van San simply finds himself outside of this development. In contrast to Van San, Henri Pousseur is at the centre of serialism as a musical movement with clear artistic ambitions. In general, one could describe his trajectory as starting from the narrowest to the broadest position within the serial project. At the start of his career, Pousseur took Webern as the exclusive model for the development of serialism, resulting in compositions such as the Quintette à la mémoire de Webern (1955), displaying a high degree of organic chromaticism. In response to Stockhausen and Boulez, Pousseur became aware quite early that indeterminacy is not necessarily the opposite of serialism but that it could be one of its operational strategies. It is nevertheless remarkable that his first use of aleatoric procedures occurred in the context of a tape composition, considering that electro-acoustic music came into being to gain full control over the sound material and the resulting musical form. Scambi (1957) consists of thirty-two sequences – all derived from white noise – with different speed and register characteristics and degrees of continuity, to be assembled anew for each performance (Sabbe 1977: 172–6). Later on, Paraboles–Mix (1972) was from the outset more radically conceived as multichannel improvisations based upon previous tape compositions. From the 1960s onwards, Pousseur became increasingly concerned with the harmonic restrictions of serialism. In keeping with one of the fundamental ideas of the serial project, he aimed to include different harmonic states between extreme values, or in his words: ‘how can we rhyme Monteverdi with Webern?’ He created two-dimensional networks of cyclic intervals in which the changing of an interval axis brings about a shift in harmonic region. This ‘apotheosis’ of (tonal) harmony allows for integrating pentatonic, modal, tonal, whole-tone or atonal pitch collections in one and the same work (Pousseur 1968). Particularly impressive examples are the orchestral work Couleurs croisées (1967) in which the human-rights protest song ‘We Shall Overcome’ is harmonically transformed, and the opera Votre Faust (1961–8) in which musical quotations from the past are integrated in the all-embracing, inclusive harmonic system. For the last part of the opera, Pousseur composed several alternative scenes, allowing the public democratically to decide how the opera should end. A work such as Modèle réduit (1975) also shows his desire to prefigure an antiauthoritarian society through musical practice.
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The combination of musical and political activism is of course also of the essence for Luigi Nono, without any doubt the key figure of serial music in Italy. But other Italian composers participated in serial adventures at a relatively early stage as well. Bruno Maderna was for a long time primarily known for his activities as a conductor and teacher, but thanks to recent publications we also begin to understand the quality and specificity of his serial compositions (see Mathon, Feneyrou, and Ferrari 2007). Maderna led a ‘workshop’ in Venice modelled after Renaissance studios in which artists elaborated projects collectively. He shared the shifting technique developed by him with brothers-in-arms such as Nono and Luciano Berio; Franco Donatoni and Aldo Clementi count among later composers influenced by him. The technique is based on magic squares that generate complexes of derived series in which vertical groups and ‘voids’ (that is, pauses) also result from the shifting process (see Rizzardi 2011). This was to remain the principal working method of the Italian serialists throughout the 1950s. Maderna first used the technique in Improvvisazione per orchestra no. 1 (1951) and used it until his Piano Concerto (1959), including the very first work for mixed media, Musica su due dimensioni (1952) for flute and tape. Nono applied it from his Composizione per orchestra no. 1 (1951) until La terra e la compagna (1957), and Berio also composed works such as Nones (1954), the String Quartet (1956), and Alleluja (1956–8) with this technique (Neidhöfer 2009). Other dimensions than pitch are derived from the squares as well: pitch and duration patterns in Maderna’s First Improvisation have different lengths, thus mimicking the color and talea of isorhythmic procedures from the ars nova. This leads Veniero Rizzardi to the following conclusion: Compared to his fellow composers in the rest of Europe, Maderna had a less problematic connection with the modernism of the preceding generation. Furthermore, his claim to belong to the tradition of the St Mark’s cappella is clearly a long established myth but of course a productive one; his work is undeniably rooted in his studies of the ancient masters. In this respect, one can even consider his tools, his serial ‘machines’, not just as functional objects; they may well appear as attractive intellectual constructions, and there is always a playful side in the way they are designed and operated. (Rizzardi 2011: 65)
This ‘playful side’ would increase in importance in Maderna’s works from the 1960s and early 1970s, as testified by his delight in experimental and aleatoric techniques, gradual shift to more empirical methods, and fragmented textures that enable extensive reuse in satellite compositions, in addition to sometimes being just funny (Le Rire for tape, 1962). Berio, with
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whom Maderna had intensively worked at the electro-acoustic Studio di Fonologia in Milan between 1954 and 1960, similarly held on to some elements of serialism whilst abandoning its specific composition techniques. In his fourteen Sequenze for solo instruments (1958–2002), for instance, the incessant repetition and transformation of harmonic aggregates is not unlike the persistent use of row forms. Before founding the avant-garde free improvisation group ‘Nuova Consonanza’ in Rome in 1964, Franco Evangelisti had been living in Germany, attending the Darmstadt courses each year and working at the Cologne studio for electro-acoustic music. And yet Evangelisti adds other aspects to the serial music then in vogue in Germany and Italy. The ‘ordered forms’ of Ordini for sixteen instruments (1955) are, for instance, perceived as individual pitched sounds opposed to unpitched percussion in part 1 and silences opposed to refined sound complexes (including noise sounds produced by extended instrumental techniques) in part 2, leading Gianmario Borio to the conclusion that the ‘Nuova Consonanza’ is a continuation rather than an interruption of Evangelisti’s compositional activity (Borio 2013b). In addition to Stockhausen, other composers were more or less involved in the serial movement in Germany. After he fled from Hungary in 1956, György Ligeti rapidly acquainted himself with Western European serialism as testified by his article on Boulez’s Structure Ia published in 1958 in Die Reihe. Ligeti’s own works from Atmosphères (1960) onwards are certainly inspired by his experiences in the Cologne electro-acoustic music studio and the research into sound conducted by composers of serial music, but it would stretch the concept of serialism too far to include his ‘Klangkompositionen’ in the serial canon. Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s serial works recently obtained the attention they deserve (Korte 2012; Rathert 2012). Dieter Schnebel edited the first three volumes of Stockhausen’s theoretical texts. His intimate knowledge of the techniques and aesthetics of serialism is already apparent in the concise early works from 1953–6 published in the Versuche anthology. But their multi-parametric layout serves other purposes than serial consistency. By differentiating timbre and, above all, separating the musicians in the performance space, Schnebel directs the listener’s attention to the quality of the individual sounds rather than to their structural coherence (Nauck 1997: 131–54). It comes as no surprise that he considered John Cage a kindred spirit after the latter’s 1958 appearance in Darmstadt. Mauricio Kagel is another composer primarily known for his contributions to experimental music whose career was firmly footed in serialism, as in, for instance, Anagramma (1957–8) (see Heile 2006 and Holtsträter 2010). The vocabulary of his works from the late 1950s and the
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1960s is as refined and complex as that of the serialists, but he too pursued other aesthetic goals such as the blurring of concert and theatre performances. The anti-opera Staatstheater (1971) could not have been written without the systematic approach to dissolution of sound material and antihierarchical stance he was familiar with from serial music. Gottfried Michael Koenig was less interested in broadening than in deepening serial practice. He worked as an assistant at the electro-acoustic music studio of the West German radio station in Cologne from 1954 to 1964, after which he directed the studio at the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht (1964–86). For Koenig, serialism was the starting point for composing music based on rational principles, and electronic sound production the best possible way to attain this ideal. Even his instrumental works are deeply affected by the working methods of the studio. To give but one example, the method of superimposing successively composed layers and a temporal layout based on measurements of clock time in the Zwei Klavierstücke (1959) clearly stem from the practice of tape composition (see Quanten 2011; Quanten 2009). The row, whether as an ordered succession of sound elements or as equal distribution thereof, is approached by Koenig as an algorithm or simple mathematical formula on which all parameters and their combinations are based. Striving for utmost formal unity and using a serial programme to produce musical works in an automated way are Koenig’s personal contributions to the history of serial music in Western Europe. Starting with Projekt 1 (1964–6), serialism, electro-acoustic music production, and computer technology are in a direct line for him. Together with Lejaren Hiller and Iannis Xenakis, but working from a different perspective, Koenig is one of the founding fathers of computer-assisted composition. The contribution of serialism to this vital aspect of contemporary musical culture should not be underestimated. Is the music historical gap between Lutyens and Brian Ferneyhough bridged by multiple serialism in the United Kingdom? The firm answer to that question is negative, although traces of it can be found in the amalgam of modernist techniques explored since the mid-1950s by the Manchester Group of composers: Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, and Harrison Birtwistle. In an environment in which Benjamin Britten or Ralph Vaughan Williams were considered contemporary music composers, a lot of the Continental European pre-war developments had yet to be discovered, discussed, and processed. With the Manchester Group, ‘signs of that most rare thing in British life, an artistic avant-garde’ began to emerge (Rupprecht 2017: 110). The models for the artistic avant-garde represented by the Manchester Group included Schoenberg, Messiaen,
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Stravinsky, Ernst Krenek, and medieval music, rather than the young serialists they met during the Darmstadt New Music Courses between 1954 and 1957. Others fostered a more intense relationship with the Darmstadt composers. Richard Rodney Bennett studied with Boulez (1957–9) and Cornelius Cardew with Stockhausen, before becoming his assistant (1957–60). Soon afterwards, they moved away from the aesthetic concerns of the serial movement towards mainstream musical culture and an acute awareness of the political and social aspects of music making, respectively. The title of Cardew’s book of essays, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism (1974), shows the degree to which he had distanced himself from his former teacher. Bill Hopkins was a British composer and critic whose relationship with European serialism was more focused and longer-lasting, in spite of his short life – he died at the age of thirty-seven – and a work list of eight (admittedly, extensive) composition projects only. He studied with Nono in Dartington (1960–1) and went to Paris to work with Barraqué (1965), whose Piano Sonata had impressed him very much. Hopkins published on Nono and Barraqué, translated and expanded Karl H. Wörner’s monograph on Stockhausen’s life and works, and authored the Boulez entry for the 1980 edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians that is still available in updated form in its online edition: the degree to which Hopkins was immersed in the European serial movement is evident. Nicolas Hodges has provided an introduction to Hopkins’s own compositions as well as having recorded Hopkins’s complete piano music (Hodges 1993). Describing the early piano work Sous-structures (1964), Hodges sums up the composer’s models, but also indicates the striking originality of Hopkins’s music: ‘While still bearing a relation to Boulez in particular, Sousstructures has more of Barraqué’s dramatic power, and more of Hopkins’s own rhythmic and gestural richness. Movement which on all levels is flexible and spasmodic is held together by a dramatic sense of great precision’ (Hodges 1993: 4–5). Listening to later works such as the violin solo piece Pendant (1968–9), it is indeed remarkable how compellingly the highly fragmented texture presents itself. Sensation (1965) for soprano, tenor saxophone, trumpet, viola, and harp seems to combine the sound worlds of Webern and Debussy, yet the credit for the conciliation of serial precision and great poetic force in this work and in his last completed composition, En attendant (1976–7), goes to Hopkins alone. One realises there is much more under the serial sun than, for instance, Le Marteau sans maître (1952–5). Along the same lines, Hopkins’s three masterful books for piano solo, Études en série (1965–72), broaden the serial spectrum beyond Boulez’s two books
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of Structures (1952–61), which have been a constant point of reference. Finally, the gestural richness invoked by Hodges above may well confirm that Hopkins can be historically thought of as at least a missing link between Lutyens and Ferneyhough, after all. From the 1960s onwards, Danish composer Per Nørgård combined serial techniques with collage and improvisation. His ‘infinity series’ is based on the iteration and expansion of a single interval, yielding not only a rich field of diverse harmonic contexts but also a system of durational proportions. Within Scandinavia, however, it is Sweden that became primarily known for its contribution to serialism. Bengt Hambraeus introduced the use of pitch and duration rows in Swedish music but, during a relatively short period (principally 1956–62), Bo Nilsson had a greater impact on mainstream serialism. In his piano solo Quantitäten (1958), the performer is faced with a complex notational system in which pitch, octave registers, and durations are to be derived from each other, based on two logarithmical scales. Another ‘quantity’ to be realised by the pianist is a dynamic range consisting of eighteen values numbered in the score from 1.0 (the softest, barely audible sound) to 10.5 (the maximum volume) (Aerts 2000). This dynamic scale and its notation are also used in the Mädchentotenlieder for soprano and chamber orchestra from the same year. Zwanzig Gruppen, also from 1958, refers not so much to Stockhausen’s work for three orchestral groups as to his Klavierstück XI (1956). The score shows twenty groups distributed over the double page, but the expansion pertains more to the participation of three musicians than to the additional group (compared to the nineteen groups of Klavierstück XI). Each musician has her own score with twenty groups to be played as fast as possible, but the density varies between 140 (clarinet), 160 (oboe), and 180 (piccolo flute) crotchets in total (Figure 12.3). Performers decide the succession of groups, but no group can be repeated before the other nineteen have been played. A performance can consist of one (roughly three minutes) to twenty (roughly one hour) group complexes presenting the total number of twenty groups. Nilsson’s composition is a prime example of what Stockhausen described as ‘vieldeutige Form’, an open form type in which the composer fixes the details but not the overall form (Stockhausen 1963b). Since it is a chamber music piece for three players, it may well be the first instance of ‘plural form’ in which the synchronicity is unpredictable as well, though a comparison might be made with John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–8). Above all, Zwanzig Gruppen is an exciting virtuosic work full of energy.
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Figure 12.3 Bo Nilsson, Zwanzig Gruppen, excerpt from the piccolo part
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Conclusions This chapter contains a limited number of examples, but even then it is clear that given the huge diversity of serial practices, all attempts to pin down what constitutes the essence of post-war Western European serial music are doomed to fail. Surely, a desire to include sound aspects other than pitch into the structural framework can be generally observed. Some composers aimed at deriving all parameters from a common principle (for example, Maderna’s magic squares, Van San’s isomorphy, or Koenig’s algorithms). Most composers selected a number of steps between a minimum and maximum value for each parameter; initially, this number was twelve (betraying the historical origin of multiple serialism in dodecaphony), but smaller and larger numbers would soon be used as well. From the very beginning, serial order – the fixed succession of elements as defined by the row – was abandoned in favour of the equal distribution of the elements: an equally effective procedure to avoid the emphatic hierarchy expressed in tonal music. Other parameters than pitch, duration, articulation, and loudness were soon integrated in the serial practice. Timbre was initially considered difficult to manage, until sound spectra could be composed through synthesis of sine tones in the electro-acoustic music studio. However, limiting the serial project to ‘pure sounds’ has been but one of the many aesthetic choices. More inclusive approaches would soon emerge, Pousseur’s serial use of harmonic systems from the past arguably being the most extreme example. Another noticeable development in Western European serial music is the gradual absorption of chance elements. Finally, much attention goes to the perception of musical form, in particular to the construction of compelling large-scale forms out of unstable and fragmented musical material, as in the cases of Barraqué or Hopkins. Although the composers benefiting from an individual chapter in this volume undoubtedly were the driving forces, serial music in Western European cannot possibly be limited to Boulez, Nono, or Stockhausen. This chapter has aimed at broadening the perspective not merely by introducing further protagonists who wrote aesthetically appealing works, but more importantly, other interpretations of what constitutes serialism. In light of this, narrowing serial music to Boulez’s Structure Ia is – to put it mildly – an oversimplification. And yet Ligeti’s 1958 article all too often serves, even today, as a convenient didactic tool to give students a basic introduction to serialism. However, Ligeti cannot be held
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responsible for equating Boulez’s music or indeed serialism as a whole with this early uncharacteristic composition. Whereas cultural institutions and politics might have construed the avant-garde and serial music as a weapon against the Soviet Union in the context of the Cold War, there is no historical evidence that the serial composers themselves aimed at criticising the lack of (artistic) freedom in Eastern Europe with their work (though see Borio 2006, 45–46). They were struggling with the past rather than with the present, trying to come to terms with Nazism by rejecting all aspects that had led to this devastating ideology. Hence the eagerness to oppose the pre-war musical developments tooth and nail and the desire to start from scratch. And yet their relationship with the past was ambiguous, shaking off musical Romanticism (and expressionism as a continuation thereof) because of its excessive celebration of the self, but at the same time embracing and productively misunderstanding Ockeghem, Monteverdi, Mozart, Debussy, or Webern as historical legitimisation for their own radical proposal. They might have aimed to reset the clock from the catastrophic five to twelve to the zero hour, but they did not forget how time had passed before that. Arnold Whittall’s assessment of serialism’s many-sidedness offers the best possible final word for this chapter: There was never much chance that serialism would be permanently identified with one compositional style, one neatly packaged set of technical principles and aesthetic criteria. Even if, from time to time, small groups of composers appeared to achieve the utopian ideal of such collective commitment to principle, their distinctive stylistic predispositions would soon erode that unity. As one of the few named techniques of composition to emerge in the post tonal era, serialism has evolved and survived precisely because it brings with it few if any stylistic impera tives to restrict the composer’s imagination. (Whittall 2008: 151)
Whittall is speaking about twelve-tone music, but it fits multiple serialism like a glove as well. Despite the fact that serialism in post-war Western Europe had a common drive, the actual products of this movement could not be more different from one another, as this chapter has argued. The joys of serial music are wide ranging, for those who care to listen.
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Serialism in Canada and the United States emily abrams ansari
No one ever imagined serialism would thrive in Canada and the United States. Before the Second World War, the majority of American and Canadian composers saw it as a distinctly Austro-German phenomenon – the epitome of the dominant cultural force that they were trying to ‘get out from under’, as Aaron Copland famously said (Cone 1971a: 141). A small handful of composers experimented with it, after exposure to the music of the Second Viennese School and interactions with its members’ students. Yet serialism was at first a European trend of marginal influence in the United States and Canada. It was thus surprising to many when it rose to significant prominence after the Second World War, flowering over subsequent decades to produce artistic innovations of remarkable variety. From the beginning, serialism developed rather differently in Canada and the United States than it did in Europe. In these two countries, ‘serial’ has denoted an array of approaches, all involving a fixed series of pitches or other musical elements, which may or may not show a debt to Schoenberg’s methods. Indeed, American and Canadian serialism has been significantly shaped by the different institutional, ideological, and cultural contexts in which composers lived and worked on the North American continent. In the first half of the twentieth century, Canadian and American composers were still working to break out of national and global obscurity. Keen as ever to keep up with European developments, their early (and limited) experiments with Schoenberg’s method of composing with twelve tones were highly idiosyncratic, shaped by the values of American individualism, the heightened commitment to creating a national music, and the idea of a uniquely American trajectory of modernism, centring around a movement known as ultramodernism. During the Second World War, with the arrival of celebrated serialist émigrés including Arnold Schoenberg and Ernst Krenek, the United States especially became an important safe haven (along with the United Kingdom) for a rejected and persecuted Austro-German serial Many thanks to Julie Anne Nord for her invaluable assistance with research for this chapter.
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tradition. After the war, as European countries began rebuilding their devastated infrastructures, economies, and arts communities, the United States and Canada enjoyed comparative stability and wealth. European composers may have believed their music – like their architecture, infrastructure, and social structures – needed to be rebuilt from scratch at ‘zero hour’; American and Canadian composers did not face anything like the same existential, economic, or ideological challenge. Rather, many were able to thrive in well-funded university music departments that were often welcoming to serial innovations. Yet this is not to say the American and Canadian music scenes were unaffected by ideology or politics. In the early 1950s, the burgeoning Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union began to create a distinct and challenging environment for composers, especially in the United States, where anti-Communism was particularly prevalent. This chapter tells the story of serialism in the United States and Canada against the background of these artistic, institutional, and ideological developments.
Serialism and Ultramodernism The story of ultramodernism is an important chapter in the history of serialism in the United States and Canada, because of its influence on later serial composers. Yet it is important to note up front that its leading proponents saw their methods as distinct from serialism, which they associated (negatively) with the Old World and the past. The remarkable range of techniques and approaches utilised by composers such as Dane Rudhyar, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, and Ruth Crawford during the 1920s and 1930s is radically – and deliberately – different from the contemporaneous work of the Second Viennese School, infused with distinctively spiritual and Americanist commitments. It is only really possible to consider the ultramoderns as contributors to the history of serialism if we step away from a narrative history of serialism that defines its origins in Schoenbergian terms. Like the Second Viennese School, the ultramoderns were interested in finding new ways to organise dissonant material. But the approaches they developed, although also employing series, often functioned differently from the twelve-tone method. One significant outcome of their experiments, for example, was ‘dissonant counterpoint’, a method that ensured non-repetition of pitches and avoided consonant triads. Crawford in particular can be understood as a significant serial innovator for her creation of precompositional schemes
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involving the application of systematic procedures of rotation and transposition to series of pitches (Straus 2009: 16). Just as the ultramoderns’ methods were different from the Europeans, so too was their aesthetic. Well aware that comparisons of American music to that from Europe were typically unfavourable, they tended to emphasise the differences between their approaches and those of Schoenberg and his colleagues, rather than the similarities (Oja 2000: 115). Cowell acknowledged that Ruggles’s music had ‘certain technical similarities’ with Schoenberg’s, for example, but said that while Schoenberg’s music evoked ‘a sophistication and a feeling of approaching decay’, Ruggles’s represented an ‘exuberant upspringing’ (Henry Cowell quoted in Oja 2000: 114). With such language, Cowell alludes to the markedly different social contexts in which the two groups were working. Ruggles and Rudhyar, meanwhile, felt that although Schoenberg looked ‘well on paper’, sonically his music was ‘dry . . . uninspired . . . unsustained’ (letter from Ruggles to Rudhyar, quoted in Oja 2000: 114). The American ultramoderns’ approach to systematising atonal writing certainly marks its own fascinating contribution to the history of serialism, if we understand the term in the broadest sense. Not all early twentieth-century composers reacted negatively to Schoenberg, however, and his music did become influential for a small group of American composers between the wars. These musicians became aware of Schoenberg during concerts early in the century. In the 1910s, some leading US symphony orchestras performed his works, although usually to negative or indifferent reactions (Feisst 2011: 17–22). During the First World War, these negative responses strengthened as antiGerman sentiment grew, because Schoenberg was so strongly associated with the development of German music, despite being Austrian. His music was, as a result, rarely heard in cities like New York during the war. This would change after the war’s end, when interest picked up once again (Oja 2000: 49–50; Feisst 2011: 22–3). Most histories cast Adolph Weiss as the first American composer to employ the twelve-tone method, following his return from studying with Schoenberg in Berlin and Vienna between 1925 and 1927. Joseph Straus has noted that Weiss’s writings seem to demonstrate significant misunderstandings about Schoenberg’s methods, suggesting Schoenberg may not have spent much of his teaching time discussing his own music (cf. Hicks 1990, 127). Nevertheless, Straus demonstrates, Weiss’s own music does suggest he had grasped the central tenets of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method: Weiss’s works use twelve-tone rows, combinatoriality, and symmetry, but his approach does not shy away from pitch repetition (Straus
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2009: 3–7). Milton Babbitt, one of the leading post-war serialists, would claim in 1955 that Weiss’s compositions and Wallingford Riegger’s Dichotomy (1932–3) were the only truly serial American works written before Schoenberg arrived in the United States in 1933 (Babbitt 1955: 54). Riegger’s work may well have been influenced by discussions with Weiss, with whom he worked at the Pan-American Association of Composers.
European Serialists in Exile The Nazis’ increasingly severe persecution of Jews and leftists, and their denotation of serial music as ‘degenerate [entartete] music’, brought a number of prominent European serialists to the United States as exiles. Canada did not receive the most famous serialists, although numerous Jewish musicians, music teachers, and professors migrated there from Europe before and during the war years. Schoenberg left Austria early in the Nazi period, arriving in the United States in 1933. Other leading serialists – Ernst Krenek, Stefan Wolpe, and Hanns Eisler – arrived in 1938. Each of these composers would take up a teaching post at an American higher education institution, where they shared their knowledge with a new generation of American composers. Krenek was particularly influential through his writings and lectures on contemporary compositional methods. All were profoundly altered, psychologically, by the experience of exile and migration, as well as by the Holocaust: their music often reflects this. Wolpe turned in the United States to working with ‘pitch constellation’, with his twelve-tone structures typically lying beneath the surface of his works. Krenek developed a new approach that fused twelve-tone and modal elements. Eisler wrote his Deutscher Sinfonie (1935–9) as an anti-fascist statement in his own tonally infused serial language, while Schoenberg channelled his emotional response to the Shoah into A Survivor from Warsaw (1947). Schoenberg’s style changed significantly in the United States, becoming more tonally influenced and more classical. These rather flexible approaches to serialism would help create a distinctly American take on serialism, for both US-born and immigrant composers. Yet the influence of these European exiles upon American serialism was not always direct. Although many of Schoenberg’s American students were successful, none became a leading serialist (Feisst 2011: 12). During the 1930s, immediately after Schoenberg’s arrival, composers in the United States or Canada who were studying and experimenting with the twelve-tone
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method were usually doing so in isolation. George Perle, for example, wrote a string quartet in 1938 based on private research into the method, although he would soon discover from Krenek that he had misunderstood some crucial aspects. Krenek praised the result, however, which helped shape the innovative alternative approach that Perle would later call twelve-tone tonality (Straus 2009: 56). In Canada, meanwhile, John Weinzweig wrote the first Canadian twelve-tone works in the late 1930s, after making a solo study of Schoenberg’s music and the writings of his students while studying at the Eastman School of Music. He did this despite his professors’ disdain for the method, one of whom, Weinzweig said, referred to Schoenberg as ‘a perverted Jew’, a troubling but certainly far from unique reflection of American antisemitism and its effect on Schoenberg’s reception (Keillor 1994: 19). Weinzweig remained committed to the method on his return to Canada from the United States. As other Canadians began turning to serialism, he was increasingly held up as one of Canada’s most important serialists, respected for his writings on the topic and his teachings as a professor at the University of Toronto (Nolan 2011). Although the émigrés were not directly connected to these early North American serial composers, they were nevertheless influential, because they emboldened those interested in the avant-garde (Straus 2009: 27–8). Come the 1940s, a growing number of influential American- and Canadian-born composers were either utilising serialism or showing the influence of its techniques in their music, including Walter Piston (who wrote his first twelve-tone work, the Chromatic Study on the Name of Bach, in 1940), Milton Babbitt (whose first serial work was Three Compositions for Piano in 1947), and Elliott Carter. Babbitt has claimed that the presence of Schoenberg and his émigré colleagues on American soil actually helped American composers get over some of their anxiety of (European) influence. ‘It was not merely that we could learn from the Schoenbergs and the Hindemiths and the Bartóks’, he said. ‘It was that suddenly we were no longer in any sense irreverently awed by them. We suddenly realised they had their failings’ (Gagne and Caras 1982: 46). At the same time, American composers interested in serialism began to realise that they saw its possibilities quite differently than the new European arrivals. Although he and his colleagues were thrilled to meet and talk with European serialists, Babbitt wrote, the Europeans’ use of ‘phrases such as “historical necessity”, even “inevitability”, as justificatory were, for us, unfortunate, undesirable, and – beyond all else – unnecessary’. Babbitt has claimed that when he suggested there were potentialities to Schoenberg’s methods that went beyond Schoenberg’s own explorations, he was quickly ‘banished from
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the company of true believers’ (Babbitt 1999: 41). The émigrés were a welcome addition to the American music scene for most composers. But American iconoclasts like Babbitt were not in awe of them. They already knew that serialism in the United States would go its own way.
A Post-War Flourishing As interest in serial methods grew significantly amongst composers of both acoustic and electronic music at the beginning of the 1950s, it precipitated a reappraisal of early twentieth-century American ultramodernism. Elliott Carter, writing in the early 1960s, claimed that he and his colleagues found themselves looking anew at composers like Charles Ives, Cowell, and Ruggles, who had participated in the North American ‘emancipation of the dissonance’, but whose music had, he said, ‘previously been considered meaningless’ (Carter 1971: 217). Two different approaches to serialism now arose at once. As Copland wrote in his autobiography, looking back at the late 1950s, ‘It seemed to me at the time that the twelve-tone method was pointing in two opposite directions: toward the extreme of total organisation with electronic applications, and toward a gradual absorption into what had become a very freely interpreted tonalism’ (Copland and Perlis 1989: 242). Babbitt was the leading proponent of the former attitude, leading the charge to systematise serial applications and serialising musical elements other than pitch. The technological capabilities of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center’s cutting-edge Mark II synthesizer significantly enhanced his experiments. The result was a serial output that differed significantly from that of Schoenberg or Webern. Babbitt’s music is highly original, utilising arrays of combinatorial sets, scattered across registers, which mutate over long periods. Babbitt also played a significant role in formalising the vocabulary used to analyse serial music through his many talks and writings. He was the figurehead for a group of highly rigorous younger American serialists who had been educated in the technique as students, which included Charles Wuorinen, Donald Martino, Ralph Shapey, Ursula Mamlok, and Peter Westergaard, evidencing a change in university curricula that indexes the change in serialism’s fortunes in the United States (Straus 2009: 124–56). Each created their own idiosyncratic method of working with series in their music. Canada also housed highly systematic serialists, such as Serge Garant in Quebec. Garant’s music, however, responded primarily to European strategies, specifically those of Pierre
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Boulez. He is just one example of the significant influence of Boulez in Francophone Canada especially. Although histories of twentieth-century music tend to focus on composers who took serial methods to their limits, like Babbitt, American and Canadian composers were actually far more likely to treat serialism as just one possible device in their compositional toolkit, as part of the ‘freely interpreted tonalism’ that Copland described. Post-war music with serial elements written in these countries demonstrates a wide array of highly flexible approaches, revealing an ‘extreme diversity’, as Babbitt himself wrote (Babbitt 1955: 53). Multiple serialism particularly was of much less interest to American composers than their European colleagues: on the contrary, many who used serial methods retained a sense of a home key in their works. Roger Sessions, for example, described the twelve-tone technique as ‘essentially practical’, taking no issue with listeners who heard ‘tonal centres’ in his music and objecting to the ‘absolute distinction some people make between tonal music and nontonal music’ (quoted in Imbrie 1971: 63; Cone 1971b: 102). Of all the composers living in the United States and Canada who embraced this more flexible approach to serialism, Igor Stravinsky was probably the most significant and influential. Like Schoenberg, Stravinsky was an émigré, having come to the United States in 1939 from revolutionary Russia by way of Switzerland and France. Given he had long cast himself in opposition to Schoenberg and the serial method, few anticipated Stravinsky’s sudden swerve in 1952, when he was in his late sixties. His turn to serialism seems to have been the result of a combination of related factors: a growing interest in the music of Schoenberg and Webern and the creative possibilities of their methods; Schoenberg’s death in 1951; the influence of Robert Craft; and also, some speculate, fear of losing status amongst younger composers (Walsh 1988: 217–23; Straus 2003: 149–52; Craft 1992: 33–48). Like many of his colleagues working in the United States and Canada, Stravinsky’s serial language is highly individualistic. Although a series of pitches served as his starting point (frequently significantly fewer than twelve), he often repeated pitches and created themes with his aggregates. In contrast to Schoenberg’s Expressionist serialism, Stravinsky’s approach showed the influence of Webern and also connects to Stravinsky’s own previous neoclassical style, employing clean, sparse textures and symmetrical designs and using small motivic cells to generate larger structures. Stravinsky employed serial strategies for the remainder of his life. Each resulting work is highly individual – and highly original – in both its approach to serialism and the sound world it creates, as
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a comparison of Agon (1953–7) with Threni (1957–8), for example, immediately makes plain. Another well-established and highly respected composer of tonal music in the United States, Copland, also took up serialism after the Second World War, provoking similar levels of astonishment from composers, critics, and audiences alike. Like Stravinsky, Copland turned to the method early in the 1950s, starting with the Piano Quartet (1950). As Copland explained in a 1968 interview, ‘the younger fellows, Boulez and such’ had shown him it was possible to ‘keep the method while throwing away the esthetic’, which he found excessively Romantic – too ‘weltschmerzy’ – and even ‘too German’. ‘German music’, Copland said, ‘was the thing we were trying to get out from under’; he had felt in earlier decades, he said, that for Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, ‘the expressive quality of their music took precedence over their method’. Now freed of its Central European philosophical baggage by Boulez’s music, he said, serialism ‘freshened up one’s technique and one’s approach’, offering ‘a new way of moving tones about’. Interestingly, however, in the same interview he described his approach to serialism as ‘very much in the Schoenberg line’ and made plain that he was ‘very vague’ in his knowledge of ‘current methods’ (Cone 1968: 67–8). He was also quick to demonstrate a longstanding interest in serial methods, despite his reputation as a tonalist, pointing out that he had used series in music before, most notably in the Piano Variations of 1930 (which, he said, used a seven-note row) (Cone 1968: 66). Nevertheless, and despite this history, Copland’s shift to serialism as a well-established, fifty-year-old, accessible Americanist, alongside Stravinsky’s, seemed to indicate that a sea change was underway in the American music scene. Although Copland’s Schoenbergian serial works seem to have been of only marginal interest to younger composers, they found Stravinsky’s applications of the method to be of much greater significance. American serialists like Babbitt and Wuorinen paid attention, publishing analyses of them in leading journals. Soon, numerous American and Canadian composers were developing a serial style that had much in common with that of Stravinsky, including Arthur Berger, Irving Fine, Louise Talma, and John Beckwith (Straus 2009: 39–40). Some of these composers had been writing serial music before Stravinsky’s change of course; they claimed their influences actually came from other places. Whatever the chain of influence, they share with Stravinsky a similar tonally inflected writing and approach to texture, rhythm, and mood (Straus 2009: 93–102). Talma, who used symmetrical serial rows within a ‘perfect-fifth oriented diatonic sound
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world’, said that the approach of Fine and Stravinsky ‘made . . . musical sense’ in a way that ‘strict serial writing did not’ (Talma, quoted in Straus 2009: 102). Canadian composers’ interest in taking a more flexible approach to serial methods began right after the Second World War. Barbara Pentland’s first serial work was the Octet for Winds (1948): it came about following conversations with Weinzweig and Dika Newlin (a Schoenberg student and scholar). Like Copland, with whom she had studied at Tanglewood, Pentland believed that an ‘intuitive’ approach to serialism offered a way ‘to escape the nineteenth century’, where everything was ‘overstuffed and heavy’ (Straus 2009: 86). After a 1955 visit to the Darmstadt New Music Courses, her music was increasingly influenced by that of Webern, although she continued to treat her rows with significant freedom, developing her own distinctive methods. In later decades, Pentland took the unusual step of combining serialism with aleatoric procedures, creating opportunities for improvisation on twelve-tone materials. Numerous American composers adopted a similarly instinctive approach to serialism, ignoring the supposed ‘rules’, rejecting the strict approaches associated (rightly or wrongly) with Babbitt and Boulez, and exploring serial methods as one technique among many. Ben Weber, for example, thought of serial techniques as simply offering ‘an available form’, providing a precompositional starting point, after which he would ‘make up his own rules’ (Weber, quoted in Straus 2009: 72). Ross Lee Finney, meanwhile, used the twelve-tone method to enhance the ‘expressive potential’ of his predominantly tonal compositions (Susan Hayes Hitchens, quoted in Straus 2009: 80). Finney was a student of Sessions, who also embraced the method primarily as a means to create coherence, without avoiding tonal implications (Pollack 1992: 432). Charles Wuorinen is another composer in this group, utilising serial organisation but retaining pitch centricity. For Donald Martino, too, the twelve-tone system was ‘a universe of interconnected tone roads’, helping create a path through a chromatic universe and serving to create formal unity, but without privileging a single row, as Schoenberg did (James Boros, quoted in Straus 2009: 129). The first Canadian serialist, Weinzweig, embraced a more flexible employment of tone rows during the 1960s and 1970s, utilising tonal centres and triadic harmonies, employing row-independent pitch material, and making ‘the divergence of serial and non-serial techniques itself into a structural element’, as music theorist Catherine Nolan has written (Nolan 2011: 147).
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Weinzweig was one amongst a small group of Canadian and American composers who combined serial writing with jazz influences in their music. Gunther Schuller was the composer best known for this distinctly North American stylistic fusion. He dubbed it ‘Third Stream’, an approach that, he said, ‘must be born out of a respect for and full dedication to both the musics it attempts to fuse’ (Schuller 1986: 116). Hale Smith, an African American composer trained in both classical and jazz traditions, employed jazz more subtly in his twelve-tone compositions, using it, for example, to shape his approach to phrasing (Straus 2009: 114).
Contexts for Serialism’s Post-War Prestige What brought a European compositional approach that most pre-war American and Canadian composers had ignored to a place of significant prestige in the 1950s? Certainly the wartime arrival of prominent European serialists had been significant. But two other factors represent important contexts for the increasing interest in serial methods at this time. The first was the changing university music scene, and the second, the cultural politics of the Cold War. Never before had American and Canadian university music schools and departments offered such a welcoming home for composers. Although many significant serialists in these countries operated outside of the university, the growth of composition programmes certainly helped in bolstering (and sometimes also challenging) the prestige of serialism, both in the United States and Canada. Where before the Second World War only a very few composers saw a university degree as essential to their training, with the rush of veterans to enrol in degree programs at the end of the war, more and more young composers sought out a university education. A proportion of those in this group went on to join leading émigrés and established American-born composers in seeking professorial positions to sustain their compositional careers, helping launch and grow composition programmes, including graduate degrees, in universities across the continent. With the scientific method increasingly revered in the academy and across society at large, music schools seeking to offer higher degrees in composition emphasised the ‘research’ and ‘experiment’ involved in the composer’s craft to justify their value. In some locales, this meant an emphasis on methods of musical composition deemed more ‘scientific’, which included serial approaches. Princeton’s composition professors, for example, when advertising their composition programme in the early
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1960s, described composition as ‘a difficult and demanding intellectual activity’, which ‘demands thought as rigorous, informed, and precise as does mathematics’ (Babbitt, Cone, and Arthur Mendel, quoted in Girard 2007: 213). One of their most celebrated faculty members, Milton Babbitt, famously depicted the composer as a ‘specialist’, whose experiments, like those of a physicist, need not be understood by the general public to be of value to society (Babbitt 1958). Perspectives like these were certainly not held by all university composers, however, or even by all serialists. Krenek complained that ‘in some circles the attachment to science has become a sort of status symbol’ (Krenek 1971: 129). Such developments also precipitated the growth of music theory as a distinct research discipline, built principally on a fast-growing body of scholarly approaches to analysing twelve-tone music and on Heinrich Schenker’s theories of tonal harmony (Girard 2007). With a number of serialists now in university posts, a few prestigious university and conservatory music programmes became major centres for serial composition. Perhaps surprisingly, given the relatively conservative history of its music program until that point, Harvard quickly became a front-runner in this regard. In the late 1940s, this university was seen as the top destination for American composition students, primarily thanks to faculty member Walter Piston, who had been using the twelve-tone technique since the early 1940s. Many of his students, including Carter and Harold Shapero, followed suit, fusing Schoenbergian methods with neoclassicism. In the mid-fifties, however, the centre of serial activity shifted to Princeton and later Juilliard, where students (and future leading composers) like Finney, Leon Kirchner, Donald Martino, David Del Tredici, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich studied serialism with Sessions and Babbitt (Pollack 1992: 426). Another influential twelve-tone community blossomed under Weinzweig at the University of Toronto. Importantly, however, not all universities embraced serialism. Indeed, some worked actively to keep it out of their curriculum. At the Eastman School of Music, faculty opposition to Schoenberg’s method was well known, as described above (p. 229). Director Howard Hanson sought to ensure a focus on tonal Americanist music, often voicing his opposition to serialism (Ansari 2018: 30–1). The Cold War was another major factor in the growing prestige of serialism after the Second World War, especially in the United States. The stand-off between the USSR and the United States had the strange effect of implicitly associating music-stylistic choices with ideological positions. With accessible tonal music problematically associated with the
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propaganda efforts of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and amidst growing anxiety that Communism might be infiltrating American society, the previously widespread commitment to accessible compositions that evoked a distinctly national experience was suddenly called in question. As an antiCommunist fervour gripped the United States in the early 1950s, peaking with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigations of Communist influence, politically left-wing composers in particular seemed to experience growing anxiety about writing accessible nationalist music. This style now risked association with the Soviets’ required artistic approach – socialist realism – and thus with Communist politics. In this context, some understood serialism as a representation of Western freedom, democracy, logical empiricism, and science, in opposition to tonal approaches increasingly problematised as the musical language of oppressive regimes (Ansari 2018). As Krenek put it, for example, the choice to adopt serialism – a style that the totalitarian ‘tyrants’ hated – was for him a way to protest and resist their influence (Krenek 1971: 127). Against this background, and especially in the late fifties and early sixties, some leading composers began to characterise tonality and atonality as binary opposites. More than simply alternative approaches to harmony and pitch, atonality and serialism were now cast by some as two distinct stylistic positions between which one had to choose. This happened even as numerous composers were combining tonal and serial elements in their music and in spite of Schoenberg’s own claims that they were far from incompatible (cf. Schoenberg 1975b: 263). Composers considering themselves on the ‘tonal’ side of the dyad were particularly apt to describe the situation as polarised. Leonard Bernstein, for example, spoke in 1957 of a ‘great split’ that had divided the musical world into ‘two camps: the atonalists, who believe tonality to be a dead duck, as against all others, who are struggling to preserve tonality at all costs’. He expanded his military metaphor further in describing Stravinsky’s decision to embrace serialism, saying it felt ‘like the defection of a general to the enemy camp, taking all his faithful regiments with him’ (Bernstein 1967: 201–2). Concerns about an artificial and polemic-inducing separation between tonal and serial composers were not limited to tonal composers, however. Finney, for example, who combined tonal and serial elements in his compositions using a system he called ‘complementarity’, spoke of an ‘untenable . . . division’ that had been constructed between serial and tonal composers in the 1950s by music critics and other non-composers who overemphasised the opposition. As a result, he said, ‘a battle raged’ between the two sides (Finney, quoted in Straus 2009: 80).
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A growing divide between ‘avant-garde’ and ‘conservative’ composers played out in Canada, too. University composition students had to manage the difficulties that came with being placed into one ‘camp’ or the other, depending on the composer they were studying with (Keillor 2006: 219). There is no evidence (at least, none yet) that Canadian composers linked musical choices with ideological ones. Rather, it seems that Canadians experienced the Cold War a little differently. Take, for example, their composition of serial works on national subjects, such as Harry Somers’s North Country (1948), a serial work about Canadian landscapes, and John Beckwith’s The Trumpets of Summer (1964), which uses serial techniques to set a text by Margaret Atwood about Shakespeare’s important place in Canada. In the United States at this time, by contrast, nationalist serialism seemed to be an oxymoron for most, with Americanists who had turned to serialism typically producing serial works that had non-programmatic titles and abstract content. Canadian composers were frequently startled by the vitriolic divisions between tonal and serial composers that they witnessed in both Europe and the United States. Harry Somers, for example, was surprised to discover that Darius Milhaud forbade serialism when he went to study with him in 1949 (Keillor 2006: 220). Glenn Gould wrote with bemusement and sarcasm in 1955 about having recently discovered that Boulez had turned against Schoenberg, a development that created a ‘cultural quake’ which had, he said, only just reached Toronto, but which apparently required ‘each of us to declare his allegiance or take his stand against the new order’ (Gould 1956: 20). While Canadian composers watched the Cold War culture wars from a concerned outsider perspective, for some American composers such developments were not merely surprising and damaging, they also precipitated profound anxiety. Virgil Thomson wrote in 1961 that it felt radical for him to resist serialism and other experimental approaches and to continue writing relatively accessible music ‘in a time of fear and conformities, of cold wars and urgent concealments’, when most composers were hiding ‘behind a thick wall of complexity’ (Thomson 2002: 164–5). At around the same time, Roy Harris described the popularity of serialism as the artistic reflection of a climate of fear (Ansari 2018: 115). For Harris, serialism was an excessively restrictive approach, incompatible with democratic values. Harris and Bernstein would both experience compositional crises in the 1960s, as they tried to reconcile their profound investment in musical Americanism and their love for tonality with a compositional climate which they believed saw both as politically problematic (Ansari 2018: 93–127 and 162–99).
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Intertwined with the anti-Communist anxiety made manifest with McCarthy’s suddenly increased power and influence was the ‘Lavender Scare’. This was another reactionary Washington-led effort, which further marginalised already-endangered and marginalised homosexuals in American government and society by marking them as politically dangerous. Nadine Hubbs has argued that the rise of serialism in the United States was, at least in part, a response to the view among some composers that the success and dominance of musical Americanism in the first half of the century – a movement with several gay leading figures – was a kind of homosexual conspiracy. In this context, serialism (perceived as ultramasculine and ultra-scientific) would ‘masculinise’ American music for the new Cold War context, minimising the problematic ‘femininity’ of the homosexual-dominated Americanist circle (Hubbs 2004: 158–69). For leading Americanist Aaron Copland – a leftist, a homosexual, and also a Jew – such anxieties may well have played a role in his decision to turn to serialism. There is, however, also plentiful evidence that Copland was very attracted to serialism as an artistic tool, once he had appreciated it was possible to utilise the method without embracing the Romantic, AustroGermanic aesthetic (see Cone 1971a, 141). Furthermore, Copland’s pre-war oeuvre had also revealed his interest in serial organisation. Indeed, Copland’s case serves as a cautionary tale for those seeking to contextualise the high status of serialism in the United States during the Cold War. The fact that Cold War-exacerbated anxieties around Communism and homosexuality seem to have played a role in bolstering the appeal of serialism for American composers after the war certainly does not mean that the method was only a political move for those who chose to utilise it. A composer like Copland was undoubtedly a victim of Cold War anxieties and may have deliberately (or subconsciously) turned to a compositional approach that drew less attention to his politically problematic characteristics. That does not mean, however, that he was not also attracted to twelve-tone methods for purely artistic reasons. The 1970s brought a remarkably strong backlash against the prestige of serialism during the previous two decades, as tonally oriented, postmodern approaches came into fashion. Both tonal composers and formerly serial composers began to use strong language to describe the dominance of serialism during the previous decades. Their metaphors were violent, ideological, and political: they spoke of ‘serial killings’, of ‘totalitarian modernism’, and of ‘a kind of Nazism in music’, in which tonality was ‘verboten’ (Rorem 2001: 115–16; David Del Tredici, quoted in Page 1983:
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SM22; Cairns 2010). Some asserted that the domestic and international effects of the Cold War were to blame for this situation. Elie Siegmeister, retrospectively examining the ‘death’ of musical Americanism, blamed it on ‘the savage trauma of mass destruction, the deep anxieties produced by the bomb, the disillusionment with human ideals arising from the Cold War, and the vicious persecutions of the McCarthy period’ (Siegmeister 1977). These ex post facto assertions that serialism’s dominance in the American music scene of the 1950s and 1960s had political causes have appeared highly dubious to some scholars. Joseph Straus, for example, has questioned claims made during the 1970s of a ‘serial tyranny’ in the 1950s and 1960s, arguing that tonal composers experienced nothing more than ‘the soft tyranny of fashionability’ (Straus 2009: 202). I believe, however, that it is problematic to dismiss composers’ claims of social and political pressure to write serial music as no more than sour grapes – especially given the existence of sources from the 1950s and 1960s that describe feelings of polarisation, an obligation to choose, and a resulting anxiety. But this is not a story of good guys and bad guys. It is possible to acknowledge that some composers felt pressure to turn to serialism without parroting their divisive metaphors – or blaming serial composers for this development. It is also necessary continually to re-emphasise that serialism and tonality were never, in fact, incompatible opposites, nor, for American serialists at least, were they treated musically or philosophically as such. Piston, for example, reminded one interviewer that tonality never ‘collapsed’, despite the proclamations of many younger composers (Westergaard 1971: 166). And yet the binarisation of tonality and serialism is evident in many Cold War composers’ rhetoric. It seems highly likely, in this context, that the extreme social conformism and political polarisation of the 1950s fed an ‘us/them’ mentality for some in the compositional world, which endured into the 1960s. In some cases, this tension between approaches produced compelling musical explorations of both tonal and serial methods simultaneously; for some, it meant ‘picking a side’; and for others, it brought internal conflict and significant aesthetic challenges.
The 1970s and Beyond The fact that serialism’s prestige in the United States and Canada was eclipsed by neo-tonal, experimental, and postmodern approaches in the 1970s and beyond does not mean that the history of serialism in these
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countries ended there. In fact, it remained influential and, even today, continues to occupy a significant place in these countries’ music scenes. With the strength of the anti-serial backlash in the 1970s, however, which continues to echo in some quarters, serial composers felt increasingly marginalised and stigmatised, such that they felt obliged to undertake their exploration of serial methods quietly and without fanfare (Straus 2009: 157). Nevertheless, composers continued to create new serial methods. Ever the pioneer, Babbitt took his serial experimentation to a new level in 1981, beginning to compose with what he called ‘super-arrays’. That same year, Shapey began to utilise a special twelve-tone array he dubbed ‘the Mother Lode’. Much more common, however, has been the subjection of ordered pitch collections to serial procedures within the context of otherwise freely and instinctively constructed music. Indeed, for many decades now, there has been much less of a sense amongst composers that one must be a ‘serial composer’ to write serial music. The ‘us/them’ mentality of the post-war period is, thankfully, long gone, and serial methods are most often employed alongside many others. Canadian minimalist Ann Southam, for example, used twelve-tone procedures in many of her works, sometimes combining them with jazz or minimalist techniques, as in her largely tonal Full Circles (1996) and Rivers (1979) (Yates 2021). In works like his 1979 Sparrows, Joseph Schwantner provides a similar example from across the border, applying a systematic treatment to the twelve-tone aggregate, but doing so amidst tonal-sounding areas, periods of harmonic stasis, and the use of cyclic patterns (Straus 2009: 159; Folio 1985). Serialism has had a major impact in the United States and Canada. It looks likely to continue to play a role in composers’ musical explorations as this century continues.
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Serialism in Central and Eastern Europe iwona lindstedt
The term ‘Central and Eastern Europe’ used in the title of this chapter should be understood here not merely as a reference to the geopolitical zone stretching from the Oder to the Dnieper rivers, and from the Baltic to the Adriatic and the Black Sea, but also to a category described by sociologists as ‘a community of fates’ (Baehr 2016). The nations, states, and countries of Central and Eastern Europe thus conceived have been subjected to similar (usually external) interventions over the ages; the most significant of these was the experience of twentieth-century totalitarianisms. This context is not without significance for the subject of this chapter. The approach presented here is rooted in the Polish experience, which can be a limitation, but also strongly motivates the author to look at the history of serialism from a comparative perspective.
Before the Second World War At the time when the foundations of the twelve-tone method were being worked out by Arnold Schoenberg in 1920s Vienna, the musical cultures of countries which were born or revived out of the ruins of the ‘Viennese order’ were undergoing major formative processes. Artists from those countries attempted to define their respective national and ethnic identities, to meet perceptions of international technical-artistic standards in their own music, and to achieve a synthesis of national with seemingly universal elements in their musical language. Modernising that language was inevitably a challenge, in the context of which Schoenberg’s method only had a limited impact. The dominant conviction was that the way to modernity in music, as mapped out by Béla Bartók in Hungary, George Enescu in Romania, and Karol Szymanowski in Poland, should be led by and through adaptations of folklorisms. This focus on national folk musics as the basis for creating a modern musical language was complemented (especially in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary) by attitudes which emphasised ideas of cultural universalism, aimed to overcome the barriers that isolated the national schools and cultures from a more apparently
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mainstream European tradition, and called for a synthesis of these elements within a neoclassical style. The idea of going beyond tonality in ways defined by the thought and works of Schoenberg and the entire Viennese School did meet with a response. However, it was only very slowly that ‘composition with twelve tones related only to one another’ took root in Central and Eastern Europe’s musical cultures. At first, Schoenberg’s method made its presence felt almost exclusively in printed commentaries, speculations, and polemics, rather than in actual music. The reception of dodecaphony was much less pronounced than that of the Viennese expressionism or of free atonal writing. Local reactions to the twelve-tone method were determined in each case by geographic context, and the distance separating a given place from Europe’s main (which is to say, above all, German- and Frenchspeaking) cultural centres, as well as by local tradition and cultural heritage. Nevertheless, distrust or even hostility towards this new idea were common nearly everywhere, as was an imprecise and inconsistent understanding of that idea, which led to situations in which even genuine admiration for Schoenberg was not translated into actual attempts to employ his technique (cf. Spurný 2005: 4–6). For instance, in interwar Yugoslavia, the members of the Group of Atonal Composers, active from 1936 to 1941 in Belgrade (and comprising Dimitrije Bivolarević, Milan Ristić, and Petar Stajić), studied the music of Schoenberg and Berg and tried to apply the principles they discovered in that music in their own compositions. Nevertheless, it was only Ristić who embraced those principles to the point of actually employing dodecaphony as such, in such works as, for instance, his First String Quartet (1935) (Milin 2017: 301). The output of Slovenian composers demonstrates, on the other hand, that even references to the twelve-tone technique either declared by composers (as in the 1929 opera The Chalk Circle by Slavko Osterc and his Mouvement symphonique (1936)) or signalled in the titles (for example, Pavel Šivic’s Twelve-Tone Studies in Form of a Little Piano Suite (1937)) corresponded neither to any analytically demonstrable, consistent use of twelve-tone rows nor to their importance in the overall development of musical structure. What these references actually reflect is an intention to use all the twelve tones of the chromatic scale as the basic music material or the application of a composer’s individual, atonal musical idiom (Pompe 2018). In this context, Józef Koffler might be described as one of the first ‘true’ dodecaphonists in East-Central Europe, though Koffler never became Schoenberg’s pupil, nor did he know Schoenberg personally. Koffler’s
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knowledge of the twelve-tone method was mainly the fruit of his own studies on Schoenberg’s scores (cf. Koffler 1934). Working in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv in Ukraine), he expressed his enthusiasm for Schoenberg not only in theoretical works and journalistic texts, but also directly in his compositions. In 1926, he wrote his Musique de ballet for piano, a work which inaugurated his dodecaphonic period, which would last till the tragic end of his life, likely murdered after his arrest by the Gestapo in Krosno in 1944. Over the years, he composed, among others, 15 Variations (1927), which was also dedicated to Schoenberg, String Trio (1928), the cantata Die Liebe (1931), and Symphony No. 3 (c. 1935), all of which deployed twelve-tone writing ‘proper’ (Gołąb 2004). In interwar Poland, Lwów was, in fact, practically an enclave of new music, where Koffler found a skilful ally in the composer and pianist Tadeusz Majerski, who, like Webern, made use of palindromic rows. Koffler himself taught harmony and atonal composition at the music conservatory in Lwów. Importantly, the unique quality of Koffler’s twelve-tone music was that it entered into a symbiotic relation with the neoclassical style, especially with respect to musical form and expression.
The Second World War and Its Aftermath In the years of the Second World War and directly afterwards, the range and intensity of composers’ experimentation with the twelve-tone technique significantly diminished. The change of political context was unsurprisingly a crucial factor after 1945. The Soviet Union subdued a number of European countries, including such former satellites of the Third Reich as Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary, as well as states liberated from German occupation, including Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland. All of these were gradually transformed into so-called ‘people’s democracies’, which were to imitate the Soviet Union in terms of political system and ideology as well. Since all forms of art were converted into instruments of state policy and of ‘engineering the human soul’, the practice of dodecaphony was considered as exploration of ‘formalism’ in music which, albeit very vaguely defined, was a forbidden fruit in the discourse of official ideology, while its authors became targets for repression (Tompkins 2013: 15–93). In the then-Yugoslavia, the situation was unique in that, under the rule of Josip Broz Tito, from 1948 onwards that country implemented its own version of communism, independent of Stalinist doctrine. The Yugoslav cultural policy of ‘moderated modernism’, in conjunction with a rather less
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strict isolation from the West, encouraged, at least theoretically, the tendency to adopt more ‘advanced’ techniques and styles of composition. This did not translate, however, into a universal readiness to take up such challenges among the composers (cf. Medić 2007: 285). Admittedly, experimental tendencies in music were not entirely suppressed in the Eastern Bloc even in the Stalinist period, which may partly be explained by composers naturally seeking to develop their compositional technique and partly by the fact that those responsible for executing official cultural policies did not have sufficient expertise to recognise the ‘subversive’ dodecaphony present in some works. Besides, the composers who introduced the twelve-tone method in these countries were, for the most part, the same artists who had studied or trained abroad in the short postwar ‘transition’ period, even if the ‘new’ techniques were also the subject of informal self-study. Finally, to draw a full picture of the situation, it is also important to consider composers who worked in exile and therefore enjoyed significantly greater creative freedom. Already in the 1940s, the potential of using chromatic material without tonal centres attracted, for instance, the Polish composer Roman Palester, who most likely drew on the writings of René Leibowitz, which he had studied in Paris. Palester introduced twelve-tone themes in his cantata, The Vistula (1948) and in Sinfonietta (1948–49) for two string orchestras. Following his decision to emigrate more permanently in 1951 (first to Paris, then Munich), his style evolved in the direction of a gradually more and more complete adaptation of the principles of dodecaphony, though invariably he had a tendency to treat those rules rather loosely or to modify them, as is evident, for instance, in his Symphony No. 4 (1948–52). Soon before his emigration to Israel in 1948, another Polish composer, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati (who was, notably, Koffler’s pupil), composed his first string trio, Ricercari (1948), in Webernian vein. Constantin Régamey’s dodecaphonic debut, one of his Persian Songs (1942), on a text by Omar Khayyam, was presented in 1942 during an underground concert held in German-occupied Warsaw. This dissonant piece made a strong impression in the context of the other, neoclassical works performed there. In the late 1940s, interesting stylistic transformations took place in the works of Bulgarian composers Konstantin Iliev and Lazar Nikolov. The former learned about Schoenberg’s method from Alois Hába and shared this knowledge with Nikolov. Both were looking for their own artistic paths beyond folklorism and tonality. This led to the emergence in 1951 of Bulgaria’s first twelve-tone composition, Iliev’s Second Symphony for
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winds and percussion. The work is based on quasi-series which take different forms and use various arrangements of intervals. At the same time, Nikolov, who valued the logical aspect of dodecaphony most highly, developed a method of composition based on the principle of dodecaphonic non-repeatability of tones in the horizontal and vertical dimension, but with twelve-tone fields instead of rows (Kujumdzhiev 2017: 279–83). Vladan Radovanović deserves mention here because of the string quartet which he wrote in 1950, even before he took up composition studies in Belgrade. One of the quartet’s movements, freely dodecaphonic, reflects his fascination with Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 3 (1927) (Milin 2015: 155). Kazimierz Serocki’s Suite of Preludes for piano, composed in 1952 in what he called ‘non-serial twelve-tone technique’, is an intriguing case. It won the first prize in a competition organised in December 1952 by the Polish Composers’ Union to mark the Congress of the Peoples for Peace, then held in Vienna. Paradoxically, Serocki’s mass song, ‘Forest Route’, was also honoured in the same contest.
After Stalin Stalin’s death in 1953 stirred up decentralist sentiments and tendencies across the entire Eastern Bloc. This process was referred to as ‘the thaw’. Its most turbulent and dramatic moment came in 1956, a date of great significance to all the Soviet-dependent states. Previously, their dependence had been nearly absolute. In 1956, the satellite states obtained some freedom, internal relations became somewhat more democratic, and cultural policies more liberal, though naturally complete liberation from Soviet supervision was impossible. It was on the rising tide of this thaw that the International Festival of Contemporary Music in Poland was born (first held between 10 and 21 October 1956). Called the Warsaw Autumn from its second occurrence, the festival ended the isolation of Polish musical culture from dialogue with the international world of new music. Its programme in 1956 included not only the works of the classics of dodecaphony (Berg’s Lyric Suite (1925–6) and Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto op. 42 (1942)), but also pieces by the younger generation of Polish composers: Tadeusz Baird’s freely dodecaphonic Cassazione (1956) for orchestra and Kazimierz Serocki’s Sinfonietta (1956) for two string orchestras, which featured twelve-tone themes. These works signalled the current interests of their composers, which for the next
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several years would centre around attempts to adjust the twelve-tone method to suit their own artistic aims. Dodecaphony soon won a prominent and widely accepted place in the musical output of Polish composers, to such an extent that listing those who never experimented with that technique would be much easier than enumerating all those who did. Following the first visits of Polish composers to the Darmstadt New Music Courses (beginning in 1957), they also became interested in other avant-garde developments. This step change in contact with the Western European avant-garde meant that several versions of serialism appeared in Polish music at nearly the same time: pieces with rows as thematic material, examples of post-Webernian thinking (such as Serocki’s song cycle Heart of the Night (1956) and Bolesław Szabelski’s Aphorisms 9 for chamber ensemble (1962)), as well as attempts at multiple serialism, including Henryk Mikołaj Górecki’s Scontri (1960) – the title itself a knowing referencing to Luigi Nono’s Incontri (1955), ‘collisions’ rather than ‘encounters’ – and Serocki’s Musica concertante (1958), which was the first of his works to be performed in Darmstadt. Twelve-tone technique was also combined with aleatoricism and with open form, as in Górecki’s Three Diagrams for solo flute (1959) and Palester’s Varianti for two pianos (1964). Such combinations are typical of the so-called 1960s ‘Polish School’, along with the form-building role of ‘purely sonorous’ values, characteristic of the sonoristic technique. Sometimes, sonoristics was combined with the use of twelve-tone rows for pitch organisation (as in the opening of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Quartetto per archi No. 1 (1960) and in Wojciech Kilar’s Riff 62 for orchestra (1962)). In other pieces, sonoristic sound structures were themselves subject to serially derived transformations (in, for instance, Górecki’s Monodramma (1963) and Kilar’s Diphtongos (1964)) (cf. Granat 2008; Lindstedt 2013). It must be stressed, however, that such frequently very complex constructivist procedures were not aurally perceptible and, moreover, played little part in defining the style of the ‘Polish School’. It was, eventually, the strong expressive qualities of this music, based on the primacy of sound colour, and its distinctiveness from the mainstream of the Western avant-garde, that the critics appreciated (Lindstedt 2018). Finally, a special kind of twelve-tone serialism appears in the music of Witold Lutosławski. It was accompanied by a declaration of his absolute independence from dodecaphony in what he regarded as its doctrinaire version and also by a fundamental criticism of Schoenberg’s method: ‘What is alien to me in Schoenberg is the preeminence of the system over listening to the music’ (Lutosławski in Varga 1976: 17). At the same time, from the
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mid-1950s onwards, Lutosławski’s pitch organisation was based on uniquely formed twelve-tone rows (which comprised a limited number of intervals, arranged into twenty-four-tone cycles) in combination with twelve-tone chords and ‘assigned notes’, that is, released from being fixed to a particular register of the chord and allocated to a single instrument (Homma 2001). Notably, despite the difference in local conditions, the reception of serial techniques in the entire Eastern Bloc after 1956 was dominated by rather similar approaches. Any desire for integration with the Western European avant-garde and its current problems came to be associated with the need to study and master the dodecaphonic technique developed by Schoenberg as many as three decades earlier. As a consequence of such a sense of the need to catch up, the serial method was simultaneously undergoing transformations and individualisation across Eastern and Central Europe. Moreover, the accumulation of avant-garde techniques in the works of Central European composers was accompanied by a need for an aesthetic and expressive self-definition, especially with respect to a sense of authenticity and a desire for original solutions. The Warsaw Autumn played a major role in transmitting the ideas of new music, because for visitors to the festival who lived on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, it played the role of a window to the world. Importantly in this context, the early years of the Warsaw Autumn saw a gradual extension of the range of repertoire, from an initial primary focus on contemporary classics to a more and more comprehensive representation of the current output of composers working worldwide (Jakelski 2017). In Czechoslovakia, interest in dodecaphony erupted in the late 1950s and early 1960s, manifesting itself in adaptations both of Schoenberg and Berg’s procedures to create thematic processes and also of Webern’s pointillism. However, impulses flowing from the Viennese School present in the works of such composers were usually taken up in a modified form in Prague (for instance, Jan Klusák, Zbynek Vostrák, Marek Kopelent, and Luboš Fišer), Brno (Pavel Blatny, Alois Piňos, Josef Berg, Miloslav Ištvan, and Arnošt Parsch), and Bratislava (Vladimír Bokes, Ivan Hrušovski, Roman Berger, Juraj Beneš, and Juraj Hatrík). What was special about the local scene was a gradual transition from twelve-tone to multiple serialism in the sphere of music material. One of the most interesting phenomena was the theory and practice of ‘tone groups’ developed by Piňos, based on his own principles of interval selection, of forming sequences of intervals, and building groups out of the notes in a row. This concept, which appeared in Piňos’s music in the late 1950s and early
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1960s, attained its mature form in Conflicts for violin, bass clarinet, piano, and percussion (1964). Ištvan, on the other hand, not only combined dodecaphony with modality (as in the Odyssey of a Child from Lidice (1963)), but also proposed the idea of ‘diatonised seriality’ (in the 1980s) (cf. Štědroň 1984). The history of serialism in Romania demonstrates how powerful the pressure of official ideology could be with respect to new phenomena in music, and how composing Western-style ‘formalist’ works could be viewed as a rebellion against the imposed restrictions. Censors counted the notes in melodic lines in search of the forbidden twelve. The young generation of Romanian composers (including Ştefan Niculescu, Anatol Vieru, Tiberiu Olah, Dan Constantinescu, Myriam Marbé, and Aurel Stroe) responded by concealing their formulas in ways which proved very hard to decipher. Constantinescu, one of those who used serialism consistently, later developed his own free way of working in this mode, which did not exclude tonal elements (as in Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra (1963), subsequently combining it with ideas borrowed from aleatoricism (Variations for violin, viola, cello, and piano (1966)) (Sandu-Dediu 2007). However, the essential aspect of avant-garde transformations in Romania concerned mathematics, which enabled composers to create a kind of alternative to serialism (and aleatoricism too), as well as to continue the folkloric traditions in music. Ştefan Niculescu, for instance, moved from dodecaphony to a concept of heterophony, which he developed and described on the example of Enescu’s Chamber Symphony (1954). From 1965 onwards, this concept, regulated by mathematical criteria, became a consistent element of his musical language, implemented in particularly interesting fashion in his orchestral Heteromorphy (1967). Anatol Vieru, in turn, worked out a complex modal system based mainly on set theory and experimented in the field of musical time (Szilagyi 2016: 299). In the new music of former Yugoslavia, the twelve-tone method made its most significant early appearance in 1960, when at the 2nd Assembly of the Union of Yugoslav Composers Milko Kelemen put forward his thesis that embracing dodecaphony was a matter of historical and dialectical necessity (Milin 2015: 157). The 1st Muzički Biennale Zagreb, held a year later and founded by Kelemen, symbolically opened a new stage in the history of new music in Yugoslavia. Kelemen’s Études contrapuntiques for wind quintet (1958) and Ruben Radica’s Lyrical Variations for strings (1961) were the earliest twelve-tone compositions in Croatia. For Radica, dodecaphony became a regular point of reference: the style he developed, though
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original, must be interpreted in the context of the intellectual and aesthetic legacy of the Viennese School. In Kelemen’s case, his wide interests led him from post-Webernian technique (including an attempt to combine a twelve-tone row with the intervallic structures of folk material in Five Essays for string quartet (1959)) to his own approach to the creative transformation of serialism (Sedak 2017). In the 1950s, Serbian composers already showed interest in twelve-tone technique, as is evident from such examples as Dušan Kostić’s First String Quartet (1954) and Symphony in sol (1957), as well as Ljubica Marić’s Byzantine Concerto for piano and orchestra (1959). In the first movement of the last, special treatment of modal hexachords signifies Marić’s entry into the field of twelve-tone music (Masnikosa 2009: 26). Works comprising at least some elements of dodecaphony became more frequent in the early 1960s, including, to mention only a few, Milan Ristić’s Symphony No. 3 (1961) as well as Aleksandar Obradović’s Symphony No. 2 (1961) and Epitaph H (1965) (Milin 2009: 90). The encounter between Serbian music and the West European avant-garde resulted in a critical reinterpretation of a wide spectrum of compositional techniques and procedures, from twelvetone technique and multiple serialism, through the sonoristics and aleatoricism of the Polish School, to Ligeti’s micro-polyphony. These phenomena were particularly strongly marked in the works of composers born in the 1930s, such as Petar Ozgijan, Vladan Radovanović, Rajko Maksimović, and Zoran Hristić. On the basis of the twelve-tone method, Ozgijan developed his own system of pitch organisation, uniquely deployed in each composition (such as Meditations for two pianos, strings, and percussion (1962) and his Concerto for Orchestra ‘Sillhouettes’ (1963)). Independent of other multiple serial approaches, Radovanović created his own method of controlling all the musical parameters based on the idea of hyper-polyphony (as seen in, for instance, Sphaeroön (1960–4)) (Medić 2019: 167). An example of a creative adaptation of multiple serialism can be found, in turn, in the Hexagons cycle (1975–8), by another Serbian composer, Srđan Hofman. One of the first Slovenian composers to have taken up dodecaphony was Lucijan Marija Škerjanc (in his Seven Twelve-Tone Fragments (1958)). A wider group of artists experimenting with that technique soon emerged, which included Primož Ramovš, Alojz Srebotnjak, Dane Škerl, Pavel Šivic, Igor Štuhec, Danilo Švara, Darijan Božič, Pavle Merkù, Jakob Jež, and others. The ways and extent to which they adopted dodecaphony (as well as the degree of its ‘strictness’) differed significantly in each case and ranged from the use of twelve-tone themes (by, for instance, Dane Škerl in his Symphony No. 2 (1963)) through free twelve-note writing (in, amongst
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others, Božidar Kantušer’s Alternations (1963) and Jakob Jež’s Pastoral Inventions (1961)), to strict twelve-tone serialism. The earliest twelvetone compositions in Slovenia included Švara’s Three Dodecaphonic Etudes for solo violin (1966) and Ramovš’s Contrasts for piano trio (1961), while the music of Alojz Srebotnjak (as in Six Pieces for bassoon and piano (1964)) exemplifies a precise and coherent application of Schoenberg’s technique (cf. Pompe 2018: 99–109). With time, however, Slovenian composers’ contacts with the international avant-garde shifted their interests, as in other countries, towards extended performance techniques and aleatoricism. The specificities of Schoenberg’s method’s reception in Hungary are related to the fact that, until the end of the 1950s, Hungarian composers saw Bartók’s oeuvre as their main point of reference. Through the agency of the theoretical writings of Ernő Lendvai, Bartók offered them a modern musical language whose complexity and degree of structural unification were comparable to those of dodecaphony. However, the twelve-tone technique had already appeared, beginning in the 1940s, in the works of Hungarian émigré composers such as István Anhalt and Mátyás Seiber. Endre Szervánszky was the first in the country to take up the twelve-tone method. His abstract, pointillist Six Pieces for Orchestra (1959) caused an ideological scandal but simultaneously paved the way to modernist trends for the younger generations of composers. From the same year, György Kurtág’s String Quartet op. 1 (1959), which combines ostinato technique with twelve-tone aggregates, testifies to the modernisation of Hungarian music. In the 1960s such composers as Endre Székely, Gábor Darvas, Rudolf Maros, András Szőllősy, Zsolt Durkó, and Sándor Szokolay drew on elements of dodecaphony and multiple serialism, as well as the aleatoricism and sonorism of the Polish School, which frequently led to the already mentioned tendency towards, on the one hand, an accumulation of the techniques of others, allied with, on the other, individualistic uses and developments of those approaches (Kroó 1982). I turn, last, to the situation in the Baltic countries, which, after 1945, were annexed to the Soviet Union. In Lithuania, the twelve-tone technique was first applied in the second movement of Benjaminas Gorbulskis’s Clarinet Concerto (1959). However, the first truly dodecaphonic work (that is, based on a row) written by a Lithuanian composer was completed in Boston, in the shape of Julius Gaidelis’s Trio for violin, clarinet, and bassoon (1961). In later years Lithuanian composers were inclined to synthesise dodecaphony with the ideas of aleatoricism,
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pointillism, collage and minimalism (Daunoravičienė 2017). However, arguably the most sophisticated attempt to individualise the principles of twelve-tone music was Osvaldas Balakauskas’s system of ‘dodecatonics’. Its essence stemmed from combining the idea of chromatic completeness with the idea of tonal centre to constitute a kind of ‘tonal seriality’ (cf. Daunoravičienė 2018). In 1960s Latvia, the symphonies of Jānis Ivanovs and the works of Romualds Grīnblats came close to the twelve-tone technique; the latter composer’s Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (1970), based on serial principles, was banned by Soviet censors during the decade following its composition (Kudinš 2018). In Estonia, the first dodecaphonic piece was Arvo Pärt’s Nekrolog (1962), while his Diagramme for piano (1964) combined serialism with aleatoricism and graphic notation. Another Estonian artist working with serial and aleatory techniques at that time was Kuldar Sink, composer of, among others piece, Five Haikus for soprano and string quartet (1964) and Compositions for two pianos (1966) (Kautny 2002: 34). *** The Central and Eastern European experience evidences a more or less direct impact by the Viennese School’s twelve-tone tradition on the majority of twentieth-century composers. That tradition was significant and intensely exploited for some time. It yielded many works which testify to its popularity, but also to its adaptability, since it underwent modifications and was approached in various unorthodox ways. Moreover, in this part of Europe, the motivations for serial practices clearly transcend the stereotypical cult of novelty and progress. The composers were not seeking novelty for its own sake. Being aware of their entanglement in (primarily national) traditions, they aimed to reinterpret those traditions using the most modern means available. At the same time, they also aspired to become members by right of the international new music community, which both symbolically and literally connected artists across the boundaries of the Cold War. Undoubtedly, access to modern musical ideas was delayed and hindered by the common Central and Eastern European historical circumstances. As such, no simple linear or organic development can be observed in the history of serialism in this region. The picture is instead characterised by sudden leaps, a great variety of individual approaches, and a unique ‘colouring’ related to local contexts. One might say that Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and so on each had their own distinct approach to serialism; few composers from this part of Europe could be labelled as
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‘strict’ serialists. Most importantly, however, when the mechanisms which guaranteed a hierarchy of musical parameters had been abolished, and the need appeared to restore in music form-building elements, composers throughout the Eastern Bloc very actively joined in the creative effort to overcome the crisis. Taking this into account, one might conclude that, had there been no serialism in Central and Eastern Europe, there would have been, amongst other things, no Polish sonorism either.
15
Serialism in the USSR peter j. schmelz
Serialism prompted sharply divergent responses from composers, listeners, and arts officials in the Soviet Union. Ukrainian composer Valentyn Sylvestrov remembered being struck by Anton Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments (1931–4) in the early 1960s: [It] immediately astonished me. When I heard it, I had the feeling that I was listening to music perpendicularly. Such a naïve impression from an unknowing listener . . . Because despite all of their innovations, the ear still associated both Schoenberg and Berg with the nineteenth century. But from Webern there imme diately was the sense of a completely new world. (Sil’vestrov and Munipov 2017)
His colleague Vitaly Godzyatsky remarked about the same period: At the time we sought out physicists because only they understood us. And also artists and, perhaps, even to a greater degree, people involved with film. They asked us to write music for their documentaries: ‘Give me something strange. We have the cosmos, electrons, the antiworld Verdi won’t work’. It turned out that they were already people with contemporary psychologies who didn’t dwell on the idea that music should necessarily be ‘pretty’. (Andrusik 2017)
Despite the attraction to listening perpendicularly among these young Soviet composers and their audiences, prettiness, and wide accessibility, remained vital categories for arts officials in the USSR, who often weighed in on serialism in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, when it was usually referred to in both specialist and non-specialist publications as dodecaphony, an esoteric word that further highlighted its strangeness and foreignness. No louder critic emerged than Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, who declared in 1963: But it seems that among our creative workers there are young people who are eager to prove that melody in music has lost its right to exist and that it ought to be replaced by some new kind of music, dodecaphonic music, music of noises. A normal person finds it difficult to understand what is hidden behind the word dodecaphonic, but in all probability it is the same as cacophonic. Well, this cacophonic music we totally reject. Our people cannot include such trash in our
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ideological armament. . . . We need music that inspires, that calls for heroic deeds and for constructive labor. (Khrushchev 2001: 954)
As the transcript of these remarks notes, members of the audience were in full agreement, shouting ‘right!’ as Khrushchev reached the peak of his indignation. Khrushchev was not alone in his dismissal of serialism. Two years earlier composer and critic Sergey Aksyuk had singled out a specific Soviet composer and a specific composition for roiling the waters, using the typically extravagant invective of music criticism in the USSR: All the more distressing are those rare yet unpleasant creative failures, when some of our youth get carried away with fashionable bourgeois tendencies, with dodeca phonic music, and ‘experiment’ in the swamp, soiling themselves in the scum of dead dogmas and schemas. Thus [Andrey] Volkonsky’s [piano composition] Musica Stricta [1956 7] did not give pleasure to listeners, for although talented, he has already been held back for far too long in the stuffy atmosphere of hopeless modernistic explorations. (Aksiuk 1961)
Needless to say, such criticisms mounted over the course of the 1960s as serialism became more pervasive among young Soviet composers and theorists. ‘So what is it: a technique or an ideology?’ composer Dmitri Kabalevsky asked with feigned innocence in 1965. A member of his audience shouted: ‘A technique!’ ‘No,’ shouted Kabalevsky, ‘it is not a technique! A system that is incompatible with the art of the people is not a technique but an ideology!’ (Vlasova 2014: 107). Technique or ideology? Music or politics? The categories were intertwined, mutually reinforcing. Denying ideology itself became an ideology, a variant of the ideology of absolute music. Decades later, the unrepentant Volkonsky told musicologist Elena Dubinets: ‘All of my life was a protest against Soviet power. And dodecaphony served that purpose, although not it alone. It wasn’t a political act; it was a musical action. In the USSR we wanted to write music that did not resemble socialist realism’ (quoted in Dubinets 2010: 61). Despite some twelve-tone experimentation in the 1920s by Ukranian or Russian composers both at home and abroad (including, for instance, Nikolai Roslavets, Yefim Golyshev, and Nicolas Obouhow), serialism arose in the USSR only some three decades later, in the middle of the 1950s, with the Geneva-born, repatriated Volkonsky its first practitioner (see Kholopov 1999; Kholopov 1983; Bazayev 2009; Gojowy 1980; Gojowy and Kolesnikov 2001; Segall 2018). It was imported. And as an import, it roused fascination and suspicion in equal measure. Twelve-tone music in
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the USSR was both curiosity and compositional plaything. But it was also a serious tool with which composers earnestly tried to create art of contemporary significance and relevance. It entered an environment of musical poverty buffeted by waves of abundance, or hints of abundance, from abroad, conveyed and broadcast by a variety of witting and unwitting messengers (Schmelz 2020). The stark aesthetic framework of the time initially forced composers, listeners, performers, critics, and cultural watchdogs to make a choice between decisive rejection or open-armed embrace. More refined appropriations became possible only gradually, later. The engagement by Soviet musicians, critics, and listeners of all persuasions with serial methods of all persuasions is one of the clearest signs of the worldwide dominance and prestige of serial techniques in the later 1950s and 1960s well beyond Western Europe and the United States (pace Straus 1999a; see Schmelz 2010). Along with jazz, serialism was a valuable export commodity in the cultural Cold War between the USA and the USSR, and in some cases, in both countries, the two (jazz and serialism) went hand in hand. In the USSR, serial music was as contested as it was anywhere else in the post-war era. Perhaps more so, for as the statements quoted above by Khrushchev, Aksyuk, and Kabalevsky indicate, the stakes were higher. Khrushchev probably was the only world leader of his stature to comment on serial music at that, or any other, time. In the United States, neither Eisenhower nor Kennedy ever weighed in on musical techniques, nor did Johnson or Nixon. In the United States, it remained the remit of composers, for as Milton Babbitt famously argued, these highly intellectualised compositional approaches were ill suited for the popular marketplace and consequently belonged among specialists in the academy (Babbitt 1958; Peyser 1969). In the USSR, by contrast, serial music was debated as a social good by composers, performers, critics, and arts authorities. What role could and should this music play in this (or any other) society? What did (or could) these unfamiliar sounds mean? Serialism’s increasing use in the Soviet Union over the late 1950s and after raised basic questions about influence and originality, about meaning, form, and content, and about self and other. The serial techniques that provoked such ferocious debate, generated by composers compelled, as Sylvestrov admitted, by a blend of youthful inexperience, naïveté, ambition, and enthusiasm, were deemed by arts officials and more conservative writers to have failed on almost all fronts (even though some of them later tried their own hands at them).
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Composers and, especially, sympathetic audiences, such as the physicists and film-makers Godzyatsky praised, heard serialism as a demonstration of aesthetic, and by extension sociopolitical, freedom. But these listeners were ill equipped to judge musical details. A composition’s overall avant-garde aura, or, as important, the avant-garde aura of its creators and performers, the venue in which it was heard, as well as the other listeners it attracted – its ‘scene’ – mattered most of all (Schmelz 2009, 179–215). Soviet officials such as Khrushchev, Aksyuk, and Kabalevsky publicly and privately condemned serialism for focusing too narrowly on form instead of content, even as foreign critics complained Soviet serial composers merely imitated (in a rudimentary fashion) better known (to them) Western examples (Brody and Oncley 1968; Henahan 1980). The writers of serial music in the USSR could not win, just as any creator at the periphery of a global marketplace dominated by the centre cannot win: the rules were stacked against them. Because of these divergent forces, as well as their own creative evolution, most of the young Soviet composers who experimented so eagerly with serial techniques in the early and mid-1960s had moved on to other approaches by the end of the decade. Serialism acted as a crucial proving ground as they developed their own personal compositional voices. The remainder of the introductory overview that follows is by no means exhaustive. It instead briefly discusses serialism’s varied formal and sociopolitical meanings and implications – its aesthetics and, to a lesser degree, its mechanics – in the USSR, by examining the central figures in Soviet serialism and by pointing to representative compositions, performances, publications, and recordings (see Schmelz 2009). This chapter is particularly concerned with the aural culture of serialism in the post-war USSR as well as with thinking about serialism as both performative presence and material artifact.
Soviet Serialism, Exported In 1968, the West German publisher Gerig, based in Cologne, issued a twovolume set called New Soviet Piano Music (Neue Sowjetischen Klaviermusik), one of the first publications of Soviet serial music outside the USSR. Edited by Rudolf Lück, these volumes offer an invaluable encapsulation of Soviet serialism near the end of its period of greatest fascination and contention. Alongside non-serial compositions for children in the first volume by Dmitri Kabalevsky, Aram Khachaturyan,
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Georgi Sviridov, and the less-known Estonian composer Anti Marguste, the fifteen short compositions in the collection include several influential compositions from the history of Soviet serialism written by key figures in its development, sampling as well its wide geographic reach – Estonian, Armenian, Ukrainian, and Russian: Arvo Pärt, Arno Babadjanian, Valentyn Sylvestrov, Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, Vitaly Godzyatsky, and Alemdar Karamanov, as well as Dmitri Shostakovich (although his 1927 Aphorisms excerpted in volume 2 are an early, nonserial grouping) (see Table 15.1). There were notable omissions, which will be discussed further below: Volkonsky, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Nikolai Karetnikov, to name just three. (All the composers in the collection are men.) The absence of these composers was not for lack of trying: Ukrainian conductor Igor Blazhkov, Evgeny Mravinsky’s assistant with the Leningrad Philharmonic from 1963 to 1968 and a principal driver for new music creation, performance, and export in the USSR during the 1960s (and after), tried to convince the West Germans to include more adventurous material, including Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta, Volodymyr Zahortsev’s Rhythms (Ritmy,
Table 15.1 Music in Rudolf Lück (ed.), Neue Sowjetische Klaviermusik. Cologne: Gerig, 1968 Book 1 Reinhold Gliere (1875 1956), ‘Song from the East’ (‘Vostochnaia pesen’’, ‘Lied aus dem Osten’, op. 30, no. 10) Dmitri Kabalevsky (1904 87), ‘Ball Game’ (‘Ballspiel’, Thirty Pieces for Children, op. 27, no. 5) Aram Khachaturyan (1903 78), ‘Lyado Is Sick’ (‘Liado zabolel’’, from Detskii al’bom, vol. 1, 1926 47) Georgiy Sviridov (1915 98), ‘Little Toccata’ (‘Malenkaia tokkata’, No. 13 from Al′bom dlia detei, 1948) *Arvo Pärt (b. 1935), Toccatina and Fughetta (from Partita, op. 2, 1958) Anti Marguste (1931 2016), ‘The Weasel’ no. 3, from Preludes for Piano (Prelüüdid klaverile, op. 1, 1955) Vladimir Tsytovich (1931 2012), Prelude no. 4, from Ten Preludes (1963) Nodar Mamisashvili (b. 1930), Prelude no. 1, ‘Whole Tone Scales’ (1965) *Arno Babadjanian (1921 83), Picture no. 4, ‘Intermezzo’, from 6 Pictures (1965) *Valentyn Sylvestrov (b. 1937), ‘Serenade’, from Triad (1962) Book 2 Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 75), Aphorisms, nos. 1. Recitative, 2. Serenade, 3. Nocturne, 4. Elegy, 8. Canon, 9. Legend, 10. Lullaby (op. 13, 1927) *Alfred Schnittke (1934 98), Variations on a Chord (1965) *Edison Denisov (1929 96), Variations (1961) *Vitaly Godzyatsky (b. 1936), Ruptures of Flatness (1963) *Alemdar Karamanov (1934 2007), Prologue, Idea, and Epilogue (Prolog, mysl’ i epilog, 1962 or 1963) *
Indicates serial composition or work by a later serial composer
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1967–9), and more of Sylvestrov’s Triad (1962), for Lück had included only the second of its three movements (Schmelz 2015: 211). Yet as his primary correspondent in the matter, musicologist Fred Prieberg, told him, Gerig wanted to include easier compositions by safer composers to offset the more adventurous offerings, thereby currying favour both with the musicbuying German public and the Soviet authorities (Schmelz 2015: 211–12). In its transmission and dissemination abroad, the Lück volumes were very much of their time and place, a document reflecting the contentious (and far from clear-cut) back and forth of the cultural Cold War. Regardless, for Western European and Anglo-American audiences it helped solidify a stillforming canon of new music in the USSR (Schmelz 2017). The Lück collection engages with how to play and teach serial music: arranged in order of progressive difficulty, it had pedagogical intent. Yet it also engaged with how to hear serial music. The movement from compositions for children to abstract serial compositions is gradual, inviting programmatic connections between Khachaturyan’s “Lyado Is Sick” – a portrait of an ailing, bored child – and Godzyatsky’s Ruptures of Flatness (1963), not in their specifics but in the indication of a programme – a story of some sort – behind each. The more orthodox and the more avant-garde compositions also share generic similarities. The subtitle of Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta, his first serial composition – and the first in the post-war USSR – was ‘fantasia ricercata’, and many of the other early serial experiments in the USSR used neutral generic labels, as was the case in the Lück volume with Schnittke’s Variations on a Chord (1965) and Denisov’s Variations (1961) or Sylvestrov’s ‘Serenade’ from his Triad, itself an ironic, ambiguous name, given that only flickers of conventional tonal triads appear in this section of the composition. Although Pärt’s Toccatina and Fughetta from his early Partita are not serial, they point the way to the serial experiments in his later Symphony no. 1, ‘Polyphonic’ (1963–4), whose two movements are called, respectively, ‘Canons’ and ‘Prelude and Fugue’ (cf. Schmelz 2002: 233–41; Schmelz 2009: 222–5). Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta, an absent presence hovering over the entire compendium, concludes with a toccata in all but name, as does the final movement in Sylvestrov’s ‘Serenade’ in the Lück collection (Schmelz 2009: 84–88). As in the early serial compositions by Schoenberg, Webern, and others, neoclassical attributes – fugues, toccatas, canons, eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury arrangements of melody and accompaniment, or, at an even more basic level, familiar patterns of textual and dynamic tension and release, thickening and thinning – structured serialism’s otherwise novel techniques (if not its ideology) in the USSR.
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Contemporary Soviet listening guides for these ancestral gestures and genres provide some help in hearing the music in Lück’s collection historically. Sviridov’s ‘Little Toccata’ (1948) appeared on an LP recorded by pianist Dmitri Blagoy just a few years after the Lück collection, in 1971. Blagoy prefaced each movement of Sviridov’s group of children’s pieces with a brief introduction for his young listeners. Before the Toccata, Blagoy said: You may not understand the name of the next piece, ‘Little Toccata’ . . . It means a virtuosic musical composition that is difficult to play, maintaining a quick, steady, precise motion. Even as such the piece that you will now hear has its own content/ meaning [soderzhanie]. The composer said nothing about this, simply leaving it up to the imagination of the listener. (Sviridov 1971)
If the first compositions in the Lück collection had clear ‘contents’ thanks to their descriptive titles – the wandering harmonies of the sick child in Khachaturyan’s composition, or the ball playing in Kabalevsky’s, to say nothing of Marguste’s animal portrait or Gliere’s evocation of the imaginary East (a familiar – to Western ears – exoticised Russia) – the meanings of the later compositions were more opaque. Blagoy left the interpretation of Sviridov’s innocuous Toccata to the imaginations of his young listeners. Yet when renowned, provocative pianist Maria Yudina first played Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta at Moscow’s Gnesin Institute on 6 May 1961, she gave her (adult) audience firm instructions: ‘This composition is very difficult, and you might not understand it after hearing it once, therefore I will play it twice. I ask you not to applaud after the first time’ (quoted in Pekarsky 2007: 25; see also Schmelz 2009: 90–1). Rather than inviting listeners to rely on their imaginations, she invited them to suspend judgement. Historian Jacques Barzun made a similar exhortation in a locus classicus of the post-war modernist attitude towards the audience, when he addressed listeners in New York, within days of Yudina’s Moscow performance. At the opening concert of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio held at Columbia University in New York City on 9 and 10 May 1961, Barzun declared: ‘I suggest . . . that we are not here to like or approve but to understand’ (Barzun 1964). Despite their very different social, political, and economic systems, Barzun’s and Yudina’s audiences had some characteristics in common. Both Barzun and Yudina spoke to select, in-the-know listeners. And both audiences were in retreat, one from over-accessible commercialism, one from sociopolitical control that enforced its own over-accessible aesthetics. Notwithstanding Yudina’s exhortation, like those at Columbia
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University at the early May 1961 concerts, dedicated audiences in the USSR sought to hear serial compositions precisely because they were new, different, and difficult. They were inaccessible on many levels (practically and, often, musically), but as a result they represented freedom, a freedom felt rather than understood. In a 1967 article about Sylvestrov in the Soviet youth magazine Iunost’, the author reacted with surprise: ‘All the music by Sylvestrov that I heard was very contemporary and new in terms of its technical and expressive means, but my attention did not concentrate on that newness: while listening, I sensed freedom, simplicity, naturalness. Exactly the naturalness of this music surprised me’ (Gorbanevskaia 1967).
Learning, Theorising, and Analysing ‘Naturalness’ ‘Naturalness’ was a watchword in aesthetic debates about serialism in the Soviet Union. Serial composers insisted their music was ‘natural’; their opponents, by contrast, insisted it was an abomination of ‘normal’ – that is, tonal – musical practice. The most committed serial advocates and interpreters – theorists such as Yuri Kholopov, Mikhail Tarakanov, and Edison Denisov – treated serialism as an innocuous tendency and in many cases framed it as an understandable outgrowth of tonal practice, something that could be discussed without raised voices (see Tarakanov 1968; Tarakanov 1966a; Tarakanov 1966b; Denisov 1969; Denisov 1999; Kholopov 1983; Schmelz 2008: 507–15; Segall 2018). For them, ‘naturalness’ also meant normal, with connotations of coolness, dispassion, and objectivity. The culture of serial analysis in the USSR developed slowly and belatedly because most of these scores were published only after a lengthy delay, or not at all; many remain difficult to obtain to the present day. Recordings were few and far between, circulating largely as magnitizdat, surreptitiously distributed bootlegs. Aural apprehension remained the prime approach to analysis and, in the Soviet Union (as elsewhere around the world), for most listeners the technical specifics of serial compositions mattered little. Soviet and, later, Russian theorists even came to use a term that spoke volumes. They called the overarching category of composition not serialism but ‘twelve-toneness’ (dvenatsatitonovost’), of which both serialism and dodecaphony were considered subsets (Kurbatskaia 1996; Schmelz 2004: 324–6; Cairns 2012). Elsewhere, I have described the theoretical hierarchy they developed as the Soviet serial bullseye (Schmelz 2009: 135; see also Cairns 2012: 115–16). This arrangement of concentric circles has dodecaphony as its middle point – a set arrangement of all twelve pitches of
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the chromatic scale that governs every pitch (or nearly every pitch) in a composition. (Multiple or integral serialism is, in this context, a specific subset related to this category as well as to the particular Russian understanding of serialism.) Moving outwards, the other circles become progressively looser: serialism consists of a set arrangement (a row) of fewer than twelve pitches that determines the content of a composition; ‘twelve-tone’ (distinct from dodecaphonic) consists of multiple, non-determinative twelve-tone rows within a single composition; and the outer circle, atonal or ‘twelve-tonish’ indicates music that sounds like but is not strictly twelvetone. To further muddy the waters, Svetlana Kurbatskaya, a pathbreaking theorist of Russian serial practice, presents an additional six categories of ‘twelve-toneness’, most based on the practice of specific composers (Kurbatskaia 1996: 32–40; Cairns 2012). The compositions in the Lück collection range across the serial bullseye. The first serial (in the Western sense) composition in the volume is Babadjanian’s dodecaphonic (in the Soviet sense) ‘Intermezzo’, part of his Six Pictures (Shest’ kartin (1965)), the first serial composition from the USSR to be recorded and released on LP (in the year of its composition) (Schmelz 2002: 304–5; Babadzhanian 1965). The six musical pictures of the title were made palatable by the national (Armenian) background of its author, which allowed colleagues and critics alike to explain away their unusual colorations. Babadjanian’s ‘Intermezzo’ consists of repeated statements of the prime form of the initial row form at its initial transposition level. Only at inflection points (the middle, the end) is a retrograde of that initial row heard (see bb. 11–13 and the last five bars). Sylvestrov’s aphoristic, Webern-like ‘Serenade’ and Denisov’s Variations are also dodecaphonic (in the Soviet sense) (Schmelz 2002: 145–6; Schmelz 2009: 135–7 and 140–5; Cairns 2013). In his Variations on a Chord, Schnittke crafts a kind of loose dodecaphony; influenced by Webern’s own Piano Variations op. 27, he borrowed its second movement’s hypostatisation of pitch to explore the polystylistic possibilities of a single twelve-tone collection. It was a sui generis blurring of twelve-tonish and dodecaphonic approaches that Schnittke later came to dislike (Shul’gin 2004: 85). Godzyatsky’s Ruptures of Flatness (Razryvy ploskostei (1963)) exposes with special clarity the social, historical, and aesthetic cross-currents rocking many of the young Soviet composers in their early serial compositions. He called his short piano work a ‘sufficiently sharp, athematic composition, but rhythmically impulsive, with elements of a sense of genre [zhanrovost’] аnd even jazz’, also influenced by his study at the time of Chopin’s Scherzo no. 1. He said it was ‘based . . . to a large degree on a programme. In the
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rhythmic tensions, and the dissonant, fragmentary constructions there is a picture of the world and the life of microparticles’ (Lunina 2013: 396, 410 and 413–14). Ukrainian pianist Evgeny Gromov goes further, saying the composition rendered a detailed narrative of nuclear reaction, explosion, and decay inspired by Godzyatsky’s reading of Robert Jungk’s Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (1956), as well as by his study of Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke I–VIII (1952–4) and Stravinsky’s late scores (Gromov 2018). Twelve-tonish, Ruptures of Flatness is driven by recurrent, related gestures and chords, but also by extreme registral displacement, generating a sort of pointillism. There is no unifying twelve-tone row (or rows) but a thoroughgoing attempt regularly to exhaust the complete chromatic (seen clearly in the gapped entrances of its first twelve bars) (Schmelz 2002: 143–4). Karamanov’s Prologue, Idea, and Epilogue (1962 or 1963) amplifies this tendency: exhibiting twelvetoneness at its most twelve-tonish, it follows the law’s complicated yet amorphous spirit rather than its letter (Schmelz 2002: 140–3). It was also the only composition in the Lück volumes to include specific instructions for realising the various clusters (including tremolo clusters) and indefinite rhythms in its second movement. As Volkonsky said about his first engagement with serialism: ‘from the very beginning of my study of dodecaphony, I broke its strict laws and treated them very freely, and then I devised my own system of permutations’ (Dubinets 2010: 123; Schmelz 2009: 88). This flexible, intuitive attitude, shared by almost all Soviet composers using serial techniques, of any generation, explains how someone such as Shostakovich could incorporate twelve-tonish materials into his music, starting with his Seven Verses of Alexander Blok op. 127, and Violin Concerto no. 2 op. 129 (both 1967), and ending with his last composition, his Viola Sonata op. 147 (1975), without becoming a serial composer in any sense recognisable to AngloAmerican theory or musicology (Schmelz 2004; Brown 2015). Volkonsky in short order introduced further novel approaches in his Suite of Mirrors (Siuita zerkal (1960), mirroring) and Laments of Shchaza (Zhaloby shchazy (1962), rotations). Denisov elaborated on the serial techniques in his Variations in his seminal Sun of the Incas (Solntse inkov (1964)) and Laments (1969), both of which blend serialism with folkloric elements. Denisov also serialised multiple musical parameters in several 1960s compositions, among them Italian Songs (Ital’ianskie pesni (1964)) and Five Stories after Herr Keuner (Piat’ istorii o gospodine Koinere (1966)) (Schmelz 2009: 166–71; Tsenova and Kholopov 1993: 84–9). Schnittke’s Variations on a Chord post-dates most of his stricter serial compositions,
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including his Music for Chamber Orchestra (1964) and Music for Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1964), which included a blending of jazz and serialism in its final, third movement (Schmelz 2009: 233–57). Nikolai Karetnikov’s Lento-Variations (1960), Violin Sonata (1961), String Quartet (1963), and Symphony no. 4 (1963) all demonstrate a more committed serial approach (Schmelz 2002: 127–35). By contrast, Sofia Gubaidulina only briefly used serial techniques in her Five Etudes for harp, double bass, and percussion (1965) and Night in Memphis (Noch’ v Memfise, 1968), before turning to structured compositional approaches based on various rhythmic series (Schmelz 2009: 261–8; Tsenova 2000). The inventiveness with which Soviet composers approached serial techniques reflected the somewhat haphazard ways they learned about it. Because they were not taught serialism as part of their formal conservatory training in the 1950s and 1960s, they were left to their own devices, relying on materials mailed across the border or brought in surreptitiously by approved official guests, or encountered on their own trips abroad, most importantly to the Warsaw Autumn festival (Schmelz 2009: chapter 1; Jakelski 2017). But there were inadvertent, official Soviet ways to learn too. On Music Living and Dead (O muzyke zhivoi i mertvoi) by musicologist Grigory Shneerson, the first edition of which was published in 1960, included a chart of the various row forms as well as capsule analyses of the rows in various compositions by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Berg, which the young composers eagerly studied even as they ignored Shneerson’s rote critiques of these composers (Shneerson 1960: 171–2, 182–5, and passim). Its second edition in 1964 included significantly more examples, among them images of graphic scores: Sylvano Bussotti’s Five Pieces for David Tudor (1959) and John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–8) (Shneerson 1964: 342–3). Around this time, many Soviet composers also began using graphic notation to either combine serial and aleatory approaches in their own scores, as in Pärt’s Diagramme (1964) or to abandon the first for the second, as in Sylvestrov’s Projections for harpsichord, vibraphone, and bells (1965), or the second movement of Karamanov’s Prologue, Idea, and Epilogue (Schmelz 2009: 226–9 and 258).
Censorship and Control Shneerson’s book indicates the fluidity and flexibility of musical censorship in the Soviet Union in its last decades. The arts were heavily monitored and controlled, but there were often ways around spoken (or written) and, as
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often, unspoken (and unwritten) official prohibitions. There were many exceptions. After the fall of the Soviet Union, near the end of his life, Volkonsky was justifiably, if belatedly, recognised for his pioneering work on behalf of serial music in the Soviet Union. He had emigrated to Western Europe from the USSR in 1973, and his name faded immediately from all official publications. But in the 1960s, harassed into near silence by the Soviet musical establishment, Volkonsky was at best a rumour outside its borders, his music more talked about than heard. Sylvestrov, by contrast, became the most prominent Soviet composer abroad, vying with Denisov, Schnittke, and Pärt. Sylvestrov, not Volkonsky, was awarded a Koussevitzky Prize in 1966 and second prize at the International Gaudeamus Composers’ Competition in 1970. Yet, as it had Volkonsky’s, Soviet censorship cut off Sylvestrov’s career and coincided, indeed arguably helped prod along, a dramatic stylistic shift in his music. Remarkably, Sylvestrov’s first appearances in the West themselves were censored, ostensibly to protect him from the type of blowback that had befallen novelist Boris Pasternak in the USSR after he was awarded (and was forced to decline) the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. At a concert at the New School in New York City on 13 March 1964, Paul Jacobs played Sylvestrov’s Suite for Piano (actually his Five Pieces (1961)) and four of the Signs that comprise Triad’s first part (also 1961) credited in the programme only to a ‘Contemporary Soviet 12-tone composer (Name withheld)’ (Schmelz 2017: 427–9). Because of the cultural Cold War, these compositions carried a mystique. Held up as exotic creations, born amid an atmosphere of repression, they drew attention as foreign audiences tuned in to see what all the fuss was about. Discussions of music in the Soviet Union often exaggerate or mischaracterise the nature and extent of its censorship. Yet beyond the common, exasperating delays between composition and performance or publication, lasting years or decades, there could be severe repercussions for writing and playing serial and other new music. Because of his enthusiastic programming of adventurous Soviet scores, including Sylvestrov’s music, during his tenure in Leningrad, Blazhov was fired from his conducting job there in 1968. Only a few months later his wife, Galina Mokreeva, a young musicologist and an outspoken proponent of new music herself, committed suicide (Schmelz 2017: 419–20; Schmelz 2015: 212–13). Sylvestrov himself was ousted from the Ukrainian Union of Composers in 1970; he was reinstated only in early 1973. It was at just this time that his final pivot away from serialism began (Schmelz 2009: 276–7; Schmelz 2020: 104–6 and passim).
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After Serialism, Hearing Serialism Many of Sylvestrov’s compatriots also retreated from serialism: Schnittke’s serial compositions led him to polystylism, and Pärt’s led him to tintinnabuli (cf. Schmelz 2020; Siitan 2021; May 2021; May 2016, esp. chapter 2; Karnes 2021). Schnittke consistently vilified serialism as an ideology even as he occasionally employed it as a technique, although it never constituted a dominant aspect of his approach after the late 1960s (see Segall 2020, esp. 245–6; and Polin 1984: 10–11). Others continued unapologetically writing serial music. Following his lead, Denisov’s students and younger associates treated serialism as a ‘lingua franca’ (Quillen 2010: 138). As musicologist William Quillen writes, ‘Denisov’s celebration of complexity helped motivate many of his followers to fill their serial compositions with increasingly esoteric, hidden structures’ (Quillen 2010: 138). Many employed what Quillen terms ‘Serialism-Plus’, or various serial hybrids, including ‘serialism-plus-aleatory, serialism-plus-sonorika, serialism-plus-spectralism, and serialism-plus-minimalism’ (Quillen 2010: 146). Examples include Viktor Yekimovsky’s Doppelkammervariationen (1989); Faradzh Karayev’s Klänge einer traurigen Nacht (1989); as well as Alexander Vustin’s important Zaitsev’s Letter (Pis’mo Zaitseva (1990)) (Quillen 2010: 130–321). Old aesthetic categories die hard. Five years after the end of the USSR, Kurbatskaya still tried to balance the seminal socialist realist demands of form and content, technique and ideology, closing her groundbreaking 1996 discussion by asking how one was meant to listen to serialism. Her answer, in part, relied on asserting that ‘serial-dodecaphonic music certainly reflects the spirit of the times in its contents’. But more than that, ‘twelve-toneness represents a new, higher stage of the development of musical consciousness’ (Kurbatskaia 1996: 317). Few would seriously argue this historicist point today; it was but a belated voicing of the assertion many wanted to make more vociferously in the 1960s, when they had felt it so strongly. Near the end of his life, Denisov objected to those who betrayed a ‘definite snobbery’ and a ‘negative attitude’ about serial techniques. His justification was familiar: ‘serial techniques arose naturally and they arose everywhere’ (Denisov and Shul’gin 2004: 139). But as Denisov well knew, serialism did not arise naturally in the Soviet Union. It took dogged effort and energetic experimentation by many composers, together with a paradoxical social engagement by composers, performers, listeners, and audiences predicated on a lack of Soviet-approved social engagement. Or, as Kurbatskaya suggests, composing, performing, and hearing serialism in the USSR required embracing new, challenging contents in new, challenging forms during new, challenging times.
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Koellreutter and Catunda, representatives of Brazil, seem to have it easier on their outpost in South America than their colleagues in Europe. Koellreutter, who emigrated from Germany to Brazil in 1936, introduced twelve tone music to Brazil as a professor at the conservatories in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. The lack of musical tradition and prejudice makes it easier for the unusually talented Brazilians to access music that is considered avant garde and daring in Europe but has already found an enthusiastic audience in Brazil. Willi Reich, paper manuscript for the preparation meeting of the First International Twelve Note Congress, Locarno (December 1948) (quoted in Fugellie 2018: 342) Dodecaphonism . . . is a characteristic expression of a policy of cultural degeneracy, a branch of the wild fig tree of cosmopolitanism that threatens us with its deforming shadows and whose hidden aim is the slow and harmful work of destroying our national character. Camargo Guarnieri, ‘Carta aberta aos músicos e críticos do Brasil’ (‘Open Letter to the Musicians and Critics of Brazil’, December 1950) (Guarnieri 2000: 120)
In his influential Music in Latin America, Gerard Béhague divided its musics into the dominant ‘folkloristic nationalism’ and ‘countercurrents’ (Béhague 1979). Dodecaphony and serialism, the subjects of this chapter, form but one of the many and disparate ‘counter-currents’ in Béhague’s account. This somewhat reductive binarism can be and has been critiqued (cf. Lorenz n.d.; Madrid 2008), but it is largely true that serialism’s adherents tended to view themselves as an avant-garde in opposition to the nationalist establishment which dominated musical life throughout Latin America at virtually every level. This state of affairs lasted roughly until the 1960s, when the serial avant-garde achieved modest mainstream and institutional acceptance, although by that point the link between serialism and the avant-garde had become tenuous. As will be seen, the history of dodecaphony and serialism in Latin America 266
I would like to thank João Pedro Cachopo and John Fallas for help with translations.
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thus to an extent mirrors that of its counterparts in Europe and North America, but with some notable peculiarities. This history not only provides an important facet of the region’s music history, but it also touches on crucial issues beyond that, such as the way artistic innovations are disseminated; the role of migration and national, regional, and international networks, among them the importance of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM); the varying connections between aesthetic ideas and ideological and political principles; and debates about progress and tradition, national culture and universalism. As in other regional contexts, the focus on dodecaphony and serialism requires looking beyond genius composers and canonical masterworks, since many of the key figures feature at best as footnotes in general histories of twentieth-century music, and seminal works may have been heard by only a handful of people. It goes without saying that this short account cannot provide comprehensive coverage of any and all approaches to dodecaphony and serialism in such a large and diverse area. The adoption of dodecaphony has varied widely across the region: while it gained a foothold in a Europeanised metropolis such as Buenos Aires as early as the 1930s, it failed to make a significant impact in other areas before the 1950s or 1960s, if at all. There were two regional dodecaphonic networks that seemed to have been largely independent, if not oblivious, of one another: one in the south, centred on Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, and another in the north, centred on Panama, Venezuela, and Mexico. The history of serialism in Latin America starts in 1934 with, appropriately enough, Primera composición dodecafónica by Juan Carlos Paz. Paz was largely self-taught, and, with the exception of a period of study in Paris during which he did not focus on composition, rarely left Buenos Aires. In 1929, Paz joined forces with Jacobo Ficher, Juan José Castro, José María Castro, and Gilardo Gilardi, the leading, broadly nationalist and neoclassical composers of the day, to found the Grupo Renovación, which, in 1932, became the Argentine section of the ISCM. Paz’s early work was in a similar style to the other composers within the Grupo, characterised by (extended) tonal and bitonal composition, but this changed drastically when he adopted twelve-note technique without an intervening period of free atonality (or any other method, for that matter). The immediacy of this switch may be a reason why, for him, dodecaphony seemed to be allied to atonality, and both were opposed to nationalist and neoclassical approaches and aesthetics.
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According to Daniela Fugellie’s account, Paz reported in a letter from January 1934 to his friend, the German-Uruguayan musicologist Francisco Curt Lange, that he was working on a ‘Composition on the Twelve Notes’. In his memoirs, Paz reported that he had become aware of dodecaphony through the four-part article that Schoenberg’s student Egon Wellesz had published in the Parisian journal La revue musicale in 1926, a general article devoid of technical issues; in addition, he had a score of Schoenberg’s Woodwind Quintet op. 26 (1923–4), one of Schoenberg’s earliest twelvenote compositions (Fugellie 2018: 149). What proved decisive for his further development was his work as secretary for the Grupo Renovación, through which, in its capacity as Argentine section of the ISCM, he entered into correspondence with many European composers, many of whom pursued similar ideas. Fugellie lists Paul Pisk (Austrian section), Alois Hába and Karel Reiner (Czechoslovak section), Józef Koffler (Polish section), Slavko Osterc (Yugoslav section), Alfredo Casella and Gian Francesco Malipiero (Italian section), Paul Sanders (Dutch section), and Edward Dent (President), in addition to further individual composers. Many, although not all, of these were twelve-note composers or closely allied with Schoenberg: Pisk, for example, was, like Wellesz, a Schoenberg pupil, and he became one of the most important contacts for Paz and his circle. The most immediate support for Paz, however, came from Koffler. When Paz sent his first twelve-note composition for consideration for the ISCM’s Annual Festival 1935 in Prague, Koffler, a member of the jury, wrote back to Paz correcting his technical and stylistic mistakes. For his part, Koffler, who was not from Schoenberg’s immediate circle, had himself received a similar letter from Schoenberg, to whom he had sent his 15 Variations on a Twelve-Note Series op. 9a (Fugellie 2018: 152). Paz’s composition was rejected, although his Passacaglia for Orchestra op. 28 would be performed during the ISCM’s Annual Festival 1937 in Paris, as his pre-dodecaphonic Sonatina for Flute and Piano had been in Amsterdam in 1933 (his post-dodecaphonic Galaxias for organ would follow, shortly after his death, in Graz in 1972) (Haefeli 1982: 493, 495, and 532). Paz seems to have lacked the means to attend these, or any other, international events; he never held any official position and had little success more generally in acquiring concert performances of his music. In addition to the European composers listed above, Paz would over time also enter into exchanges with North American correspondents, including Ernst Krenek, Lazare Sanimsky, Nicolas Slonimsky, and Aaron Copland (Fugellie 2018: 147). Owing to this impressive network, he was
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well informed about international developments, despite the difficulties of finding scores or secondary literature in Buenos Aires during the 1930s and 1940s (a problem common in most of the rest of the world). Paz seems to have completed his book Arnold Schönberg o el fin de la era tonal (Arnold Schoenberg or the End of the Tonal Era) in 1949, although the work would not appear in print until almost a decade thereafter (Fugellie 2018: 282–3; Paz 1958). The work demonstrates a good grasp of Schoenberg’s work as well as of the relevant dodecaphonic theory of the time, including seminal work by Krenek and René Leibowitz (Krenek 1940; Leibowitz 1947). As Fugellie points out, however, Paz had only received many of the scores shortly before, so his initial knowledge of dodecaphonic composition during the period from 1934 to 1949 was partial at best. As will be seen (below, p. 270), he largely lost interest in twelve-note composition thereafter. A curious aspect of Paz’s twelve-note compositions is that, with one important exception, he only used one series in its prime form and retrograde without transpositions, inversions, or retrograde inversions. For anyone schooled in the mature works of the Second Viennese School – or most other canonic serial composition – this represents an almost inconceivable limitation. Nor did he use dodecaphony freely by restricting it to thematic or, more widely, melodic invention. On the contrary, what he valued was the method’s strictness, and in most cases, every single note is directly derived from the prime form or its retrograde. In his Introducción a la música de nuestro tiempo, which he wrote after his Schoenberg book, but which was published before it, he argued for ‘a strict mental hygiene in music, which strips it of all literary and sentimental tricks and lends it aesthetic autonomy, defined limits and spatial concretion’. These can be found primarily in ‘impersonal forms like the suite, the invention, the passacaglia, the canon or the polymelody’ (Paz 1958: 112). In general, his early dodecaphonic works feature the kind of dense counterpoint and motoric rhythms characteristic of Schoenberg’s earliest twelve-note works, such as the Suite for Piano op. 25 or indeed the Woodwind Quintet that Paz knew. Although Paz clearly identified with an avant-gardist position both within Argentina and Latin America and in his international alliances, some of his rhetoric is reminiscent of Jean Cocteau’s Rappel à l’ordre (Cocteau 1926), just as his music recalls neoclassicism and Neue Sachlichkeit, more even than Schoenberg’s work from the 1920s and 1930s did. According to Fugellie, the apex of Paz’s dodecaphonic phase is formed by Música 1946 op. 45 (1945–7) and Dédalus, 1950 op. 46 (1950–1), which
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reveal Paz’s greater familiarity with the work of Schoenberg and Webern (Fugellie 2018: 278–89). Here, Paz employed what he called ‘symmetry’, a term which Fugellie adopts, despite the fact that neither of the fundamental rows is in fact symmetrical as stated, even if Paz’s concern for selfsimilar cells, specifically trichords, and a correspondingly reduced number of interval classes is evident. Paz had by that time performed Webern’s Variations for Piano op. 27 (1936), which provides many examples of both horizontal and vertical (palindromic) symmetry, although its fundamental row itself is not symmetrical either (in contradistinction to the palindromic row employed in his Symphony op. 21, for instance, which Paz may not have known) (cf. Bailey 1991: 61–2 and 109–12). In Dédalus, Paz employed all principal row transformations for the first time. In general, it is a remarkable work, on a completely different scale and level than some of his earlier dodecaphonic efforts and arguably on a par with anything else composed at the time. It therefore seems ironic that Paz abandoned dodecaphony after the work, at the very moment when he gained mastery of the technique. He did not, however, discard serialism as such and indeed explored multiple serialism through a serial ordering of rhythm and dynamics in addition to pitch in his Transformaciones canónicas op. 49 (1955) (cf. Ibáñez-Richter 2014: 237), but he seems to have regarded this as a new, and separate, direction. Paz’s influence was not restricted to his compositions, however. It was his tireless activities as an organiser, critic, author, and teacher that inspired successive generations of composers in Argentina and beyond. Paradoxically, it may have been the break, in 1936, with his previous institutional base, the Grupo Renovación, that enabled him to find new followers and allies. This conflict seems not to have been caused by aesthetic differences, but by Paz’s affair with Sofía Knoll, an AustrianJewish immigrant, which caused a scandal in what was a predominantly conservative country. Significantly, Paz’s wife was none other than Eloísa García Castro, the cousin of Juan José and José Maria Castro, the leading lights of the Grupo and stalwarts of the musical establishment (Juan José was the Director of the Teatro Colón and José Maria of the Buenos Aires Municipal Band, among many other positions and honours) (Fugellie 2018: 156–). Left to his own devices, Paz founded the Conciertos de la Nueva Música (CNM) in 1937, which became the Agrupación Nueva Música (ANM) in 1944. Under this umbrella, Paz assembled a circle of likeminded composers and musicians, many of them his students. In the early years, the Hungarian émigré Estéban (István) Eitler and the writer and composer Daniel Devoto were important supporters, succeeded in later
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periods by Francisco Kröpfl, Mauricio Kagel, and Michael Gielen, who would become one of the leading conductors specialising in new music. The CNM and ANM performed compositions by their members as well as the international avant-garde, focusing, if not exclusively, on the Second Viennese School. The organisation’s fortunes varied considerably, but it was always run on a shoestring budget and in semi-informal ways. The same is true of its performance venues, although it saw something of a golden age during a period of left-wing government when it was able to hold concerts in the Teatro del Pueblo, a home for progressive art, culture, and politics in the centre of the city. In a letter to Lange, Paz spoke of enthusiastic audiences of at least 550 people during the 1938 season (Fugellie 2018: 213). Only the absence of a piano caused practical difficulties. This period came to an end with the military coup of 1943, a moment which is more generally indicative of the specific problems faced by modernist composers in Latin America. Throughout this period, Paz and his circle were mostly ignored if not rejected by the largely conservative, nationalist critics. The antagonistic relations with the Grupo Renovación came to a head when Paz attacked the (later-withdrawn) Sinfonia porteña (1942) by one of the most promising figures in the nationalist camp, Alberto Ginastera, in a review. For many years, the scene would be split between the internationalist, serial avantgarde around Paz and the nationalist, conservative, largely neoclassical movement headed by Ginastera (Buch 2007: 11). The story of the development of dodecaphony in Brazil mostly parallels that in neighbouring Argentina, but there are some differences. The leading figure here was Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, a German immigrant who arrived in Brazil, via Switzerland, in 1937. His studies in Berlin coincided with the ‘Hindemith affair’ (cf. Janik 2005: 71–2), as a consequence of which Hindemith took indefinite leave from his teaching position and emigrated soon after. Koellreutter seems to have only studied with him privately but signed a petition in support of Hindemith (Fugellie 2018: 168–9). Unlike Paz and many other immigrants, he established himself fairly quickly, teaching at the Brazilian Conservatory in Rio de Janeiro (from 1937) and the São Paulo Institute of Music (1942–4). In 1939, he set up Música Viva, which became a counterpart to the CNM and ANM in Buenos Aires and was closely aligned with it; the mercurial Estéban Eitler played a role in both (as well as in the Chilean Tonus, as will be detailed below, pp. 273–4). In addition, Koellreutter regularly corresponded with Paz; another connection was their common friend Lange, who acted as a nexus and supporter of composers across Latin America. Although
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Koellreutter claimed to have come across the technique in Switzerland, he always stressed that what drove him to explore dodecaphony was the inquisitiveness of his pupil Cláudio Santoro (1919–89) (Fugellie 2018: 312). Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the first dodecaphonic composition in Brazil was composed by Koellreutter, namely his Inventions for woodwind trio (1940), followed by the piano piece Música 1941 (1941) and the Variations 1941 for String Quartet (1941). Santoro was not far behind, though: his Sonatas for violin and violin and piano are both from 1940, and his Pequena Toccata for piano from 1942. In contrast to Paz, Koellreutter explored all primary dodecaphonic transformations from the start, but, again unlike Paz, he was never interested in strict adherence and only used the technique as far as he found it useful. The same can be said of his students, with the result that Brazilian twelve-note compositions can often only be identified as such through their composers’ declared intention, and it can be difficult to recognise serial structures. This difference may be a consequence of Paz and Koellreutter’s divergent personalities, but it is also possible that the essentially self-taught Paz looked to serialism as a guarantor of rigour and order for which Koellreutter, steeped as he was in traditional technique, saw less need. Under the influence of both nationalist and Marxist ideologies, some of Koellreutter’s students – including Santoro, César Guerra-Peixe, and Eunice Katunda – also explored combinations of serialism with elements of Brazilian traditional and popular music. Not all these experiments were successful, not least in the eyes of their composers, who went on to abandon serialism altogether, even if Santoro and Katunda were to return to it in the 1960s. Nevertheless, the independence and vitality of Brazilian serialism is striking. Another specificity, in comparison with Argentina and, as will be seen (below, pp. 273–4), Chile, is the number and prominence of Koellreutter’s female students: Katunda is a key figure. Her Hommage à Schoenberg (1949) was the only Latin American composition included in the ISCM Festival in Brussels (1950), and she was an important influence on Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono, with whom she was in regular correspondence, leading, among other things, to Nono’s use of a Brazilian song in his Polifonica–Monodia–Ritmica (1951) (Iddon 2013: 43–4; Fugellie 2018: 394–5). At the very next ISCM Festival (1951, in Frankfurt), another composition by one of Koellreutter’s students was performed: Nininha Gregori’s Quatro líricas grecas (1950) (Haefeli 1982: 505–6; Fugellie 2018: 358 and 396). Fugellie also lists Lavinia Viotti, Sonia Born, and Maria Lucia Mazurek among those who accompanied Koellreutter to Darmstadt in 1951 alone (Fugellie 2018: 358).
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Unlike Paz, Koellreutter travelled extensively to Europe between 1948 and 1951, visiting, among others, the first and second dodecaphonic congresses in Milan (1948) and Darmstadt (1951), the ISCM Festival 1949, and the Darmstadt New Music Courses in 1949 and 1951, giving at the latter a lecture on ‘Twelve-Tone Music in Brazil’ (Fugellie 2018: 342– 64). Indeed, during his first journey in 1948, he gave a course on dodecaphony in Milan which was attended by Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna, among others (the occasion on which Katunda, Nono, and Maderna first met) (Fugellie 2018: 348). His international success contrasted with the situation he was confronted with back in Brazil, as is apparent from the epigraph at the head of this chapter. His relation to Brazil’s compositional establishment in many ways mirrors that of Paz in Argentina. In his early years, he was friends with most of his colleagues, including Camargo Guarnieri, one of the leading figures in the country’s musical life and, like virtually all his peers, a committed nationalist (second only to Heitor Villa-Lobos, who preferred to stay above the fray, however). Whether the relative unity among composers was broken by the factionalism of the avant-garde or whether nationalism had changed from a progressive and modernist position to a reactionary one probably depends on perspective. In 1950, Guarnieri published ‘An Open Letter’, a vicious attack on the unnamed Koellreutter, quoted in the epigraph (Fugellie 2018: 318). Where the affair surrounding the ‘Open Letter’ differs from the conflict between the nationalist-conservative and serialistprogressive factions elsewhere, as exemplified by the Ginastera affair in Argentina, is that Guarnieri’s ‘Open Letter’ can be understood both from a reactionary/nationalist and a Zhdanovite Communist position. It was accordingly embraced by both the right and the extreme left (Egg 2006; Silva 1999: 184). The prevalence of the latter and the influence of the Partido Comunista Brasileiro (PCB) is a peculiarity of the Brazilian situation. Among Koellreutter’s students, Santoro and Katunda were members of the PCB, and both visited the Second International Congress of Composers and Music Critics 1948 in Prague, where the Zhdanov doctrine of socialist realism was proclaimed (Carroll 2006: 37–49). Santoro adopted the party line wholesale, denounced his teacher, and supported Guarnieri’s letter. Katunda was more ambivalent, but she too toed the line in support of Guarnieri, although she apologised publicly to Koellreutter in 1979. Others, notably his student Edino Krieger, continued to support Koellreutter publicly (Fugellie 2018: 401). Meanwhile, dodecaphony also took hold in Chile, where the organisation Tonus was set up largely on the model of the ANM and was active
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from 1947 to 1959. One of the links to Buenos Aires was none other than Estéban Eitler, Paz’s student, who moved between Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, but whose centre of activities for many years was Santiago de Chile. Eitler is a particularly fascinating figure who epitomises the immigrant experience. He was enthralled by the traditional music of the Quechua and Paraná, adopted impressionism, post-impressionism, pentatonicism, neoclassicism, and dodecaphony in short order, and, among many other activities as composer and flautist in virtually all spheres of musical life, was the leader of a popular dance band called Don Esteban y sus Trotamundos (Fugellie 2018: 178–94). But the leading figure in Tonus was the Dutch immigrant Fré Focke (1910–89). Focke was a student of Willem Pijper, the leading Dutch composer of his generation, and, uniquely among Latin America-based composers, Anton Webern, if apparently only for a brief period in the 1940s. What singles him out from the many other European, often Jewish, immigrants, is that, apparently unbeknownst to the generally left-leaning avant-garde and his fellow immigrants, he came ‘from the other side’. Although there is no evidence that Focke was an active Nazi, his European career took place largely in Germany and German-occupied Vienna. The chief reason for this was the operatic career of his wife, the contralto Ria Focke, who went to Germany in 1936 and who, among other activities, performed Erda at the Bayreuth Festival from 1939 (Fugellie 2018: 194–8; Kutsch and Riemens 2012: 1500). After the war, the Fockes briefly returned to the Netherlands, where they would have been less than welcome, before moving to Sweden, where the Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau suggested they move to Chile, which they did in 1947 (Fugellie 2018: 198). Like Koellreutter in Brazil, Focke was able to establish himself relatively quickly, and Tonus had a less antagonistic relationship to the country’s musical establishment than its Argentine and Brazilian counterparts. As already mentioned (above, p. 267), serialism seems to have developed in the north of Latin America independently of the south, and it tended to arrive not directly from Europe but from the United States. Pride of place has to go to the Black Panamanian composer Roque Cordero (1917–2008). Cordero won a scholarship to the University of Minnesota in 1943, attracting the attention of Ernst Krenek, with whom he studied before returning to Panama and becoming a leading figure in its musical life. In addition, he continued to have a distinguished parallel career in the United States (Stallings 2015). He embraced dodecaphony from the 1940s and left his mark on the musical lives of neighbouring countries, notably at the regular Festival de Música in Caracas, which, from 1954, attempted to put Venezuela on the
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musical map. According to Miguel Astor (2008), the Festival was marked by the ‘conflict between nationalism and modernism’. In Manuel Laufer’s account, while the supremacy of nationalism was not openly questioned at the first Festival in 1954, conflict broke out into the open at its second iteration in 1957, which featured, among other things, a talk by René Leibowitz. During the Festival, Cordero emerged as ‘the most militant defender of twelve-tone technique’ with an article entitled ‘Nationalism versus Dodecaphonism?’. In it he responded to a question posed by the critic Edgardo Martín, who, in a review of Cordero’s Second Symphony, had asked ‘to what extent is it logical, convenient, and healthy (artistically speaking) for composers from America to compose in this [dodecaphonic] manner?’. Cordero retorted that ‘that question is unnecessary. Must it be considered illogical for a man of today to express himself in the language of his times?’ He went on to critique the dichotomy between the two concepts: ‘nationalism and dodecaphonism are two different things, but they are not antagonistic’, thereby criticising what he saw as a conflation between technical means and aesthetic principles (Laufer 2015: 61–3). Although Cordero was a strict serial composer (Orosz 2018), there is certainly nothing cerebral or esoteric in his compositions, even if explicitly nationalist elements are harder to detect. One prominent ally was the great Cuban writer and musicologist Alejo Carpentier, then exiled in Venezuela. Although temperamentally more drawn to musical nationalism, he argued that there was no reason to reject new techniques: Now, in many Latin American countries, there is an unwarranted suspicion of twelve tone techniques. It has been claimed that such acquisitions are contrary to the spirit of what “should” (?) be our music. . . . Thus it may seem as if by studying a system that is part of the conquests of the contemporary artist one is abjuring something, when that is not the case. (Quoted in Astor 2008: 70 1)
It is in this climate that Venezuelan composers, such as Alejandro Planchart, better known as a musicologist, and Rhazés Hernández López experimented with dodecaphony. Other important figures at the Caracas Festival were Rodolfo Halffter, the first Mexican composer to adopt dodecaphony with his Tres hojas de album for piano (1953), and Ginastera, who, by that time, had left his early ‘objective nationalism’ behind. Even more conservative composers were drawn to serialism at times, such as the Peruvian Enrique Iturriaga, another stalwart of the Caracas Festival, as in his Vivencias I–IV (1965) (Estenssoro 2001). Thus, in the 1960s, serialism could no longer be considered a ‘countercurrent’ to the mainstream of ‘folkloristic nationalism’, as Béhague would
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have it. In many cases, old hostilities crumbled. In 1958, Ginastera composed his Second String Quartet, his first fully dodecaphonic work. This was no sudden volte-face, but the result of a long process (Kuss 2013). Nor was he alone: many composers from the nationalist or conservative camp experimented with the method at the time; even Guarnieri tasted the fruits of the ‘wild fig tree of cosmopolitanism’ in his Fifth Piano Concerto (1970) (Béhague 2001). Of particular significance for Latin-American music was the founding in 1962 of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) under the auspices of the Instituto di Tella in Buenos Aires. Ginastera became the Director, and he showed little trace of his earlier nationalist, conservative affiliation, although much of the day-to-day teaching was in any case carried out by his assistant and former student, Gerardo Gandini. The Centre hosted leading international lights such as Luigi Dallapiccola, Luigi Nono, Iannis Xenakis, Aaron Copland, and Earle Brown, but it had an even greater impact in bringing together and energising the Latin American avant-garde. In 1967, Ginastera even installed Kröpfl, the then-Director of the Agrupación Nueva Música, his former nemesis, to direct the CLAEM’s electronic studio. According to Edgardo Herrera, ‘strict twelve-tone compositions were rare among CLAEM composers, other than required classroom exercises. A more common compositional practice consisted of employing serial procedures to generate mainly pitch and rhythmic materials and use them freely in a composition’. He mentions Marco Aurelio Vanegas’s Sonata for viola and piano and Mesías Maiguashca’s Variations for wind quartet from the student concert in 1963 as examples. His conclusion that, ‘overall, serialism was perhaps the point of entry for many composers to the world of avantgarde musical practices, but for most, it was certainly not an ending point’ is convincing. By that point, serialism, both in its dodecaphonic and multiple incarnations, was one modernist technique among others and no longer the shibboleth for entry into the avant-garde camp (if it ever was) (Herrera 2020: 109–10). Unfortunately, the Centre was forced to close in 1971, owing to a combination of the increasing political instability during the ‘Argentine Revolution’ and related economic developments that bankrupted the businesses of the di Tella family and decimated their fortune. Despite its brief existence, the Centre profoundly shaped many composers from across the continent, many of whom went on to play leading roles in their respective countries.
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The influence of multiple serialism is more difficult to trace than that of dodecaphony. Paz explored it in 1955, and it is certainly a reference point for later generations of composers. As mentioned above, it also played an, albeit apparently minor, role at CLAEM. It may therefore not come as a surprise that a CLAEM graduate, the Peruvian Mesías Maiguashca, would become the assistant of Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was most intimately associated with the technique, from 1968 to 1972. That said, the Mexican Julio Estrada, Stockhausen’s student in 1968 to 1969, also has to be mentioned in this context, even if, for Estrada, too, multiple serialism served more as a starting point. More often than not, the specificities of the technique are submerged in combinations with, variously, aleatory technique, music theatre, (live) electronics, experimentalism, microtonality, or spectralism, to form a generalised avant-gardism. In many cases, these techniques and principles were introduced in quick succession if not at the same time (the same can be said about dodecaphony in some instances), so that careful distinctions are often difficult to undertake. This is not to minimise, however, the pivotal role that serialism played in shaping modernist and avant-garde composition in Latin America.
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Serialism in East Asia nancy yunhwa rao
Serialism in Asia went through a process of introduction, experiment, denouncement, concealment, integration, and expansion. The century’s turmoil – civil wars, the Second World War, and colossal political shifts – were not simply the backdrop against which the history of serialism in Asia unfolded but were integral to its trajectories. The rise and fall of political ideologies, colonial conditions, governmental constraints and reforms as well as social movements steered the course and determined how serialism could be integrated with the region’s distinctive musical aesthetics. Mobility – movement of people both transcontinental and intra-Asia – created interesting paths through which the concept of dodecaphony was circulated to and in Asia, itself a fascinating window on the history of modern music. After nearly a century of circulation, serialism has merged with different aesthetics of various Asian cultures and traditions in noteworthy ways.
China The development of serial thinking in Chinese contemporary music spanned nearly a century. Although the process was marked by significant ruptures, it would eventually prosper, rising to become a prominent trend of contemporary composition between 1980 and 2000. Its prominence is, paradoxically, related to some extent to the cause of its rupture: a pursuit of doctrine and system of validation for musical composition and national identity. This complicated history can be divided into four periods.
First Period: Emancipation of Dissonance
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The name of Schoenberg first emerged in China in 1928 in the climate of modernisation that can be traced back to the May Fourth Movement of 1919, an intellectual revolution and sociopolitical reform directed at rebuilding society and culture. Chinese who studied abroad became the main source of Western knowledge, and, during this period, Japan was the
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most popular destination. Ke Zhenghe, a native Taiwanese under Japanese colonisation, went to the Tokyo Music School (later, Tokyo University of the Arts) intermittently for five years before going to teach at Beijing Normal University. There, he joined a society of music scholars and amateur enthusiasts and founded the journal New Music Tide in 1927. The journal explored all aspects of Western music; Ke himself penned many articles on concepts such as the whole tone scale, chromatic scale, polytonality, atonality, and polyrhythm. In 1928, he published ‘Schoenberg’s Music’ as the journal’s lead article, with Schoenberg’s portrait on the journal cover (Zhao 2019: 25; Li 2013). It was a chronological survey up to and including Pierrot Lunaire op. 21 (1912). The enthusiasm for contemporary music – Stravinsky graced the cover of the following issue, while Scriabin, Debussy, and Hindemith were frequent topics – reflected the musical climate for the elite in Beijing. In 1931, the Shanghaibased journal Musical Art discussed Schoenberg’s op. 25 and dodecaphony in an article entitled ‘Introducing Several New Composers’. Its author, editor Qingzhu (the pen name of Liao Shangguo), earned a doctoral degree in law from the University of Berlin in 1920. He published many articles, introducing Harmonielehre and defending dodecaphony against German nationalists’ denouncement of it as degenerate (Zhang 2017: 24). Qingzhu also translated an article by a German friend, Klaus Pringsheim, who was a student of Mahler and shared Mahler’s supportive view towards Schoenberg’s innovation. (The chapter will return to Pringsheim on p. 289.) In the 1930s, articles and books, many translated from Japanese, fostered an openness to new music and atonality in China, despite the lack of stable resources and infrastructure of the decentralised education owing to the turmoil occasioned by, inter alia, the Northern Expedition, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and the Second Sino-Japanese War. The tumultuous times were marked by frequent warfare in attempts to unify the country, as well as temporary relocations of many universities into interior China following Japanese occupation of major cities such as Beijing and Nanjing.
Second Period: Modern Music in Shanghai By the 1930s, Shanghai had become the centre for China’s new music, owing to the establishment and growing prominence of the National Vocational Music School Shanghai (later Shanghai Conservatory of Music, hereafter SCM). It was founded in 1927 by Xiao Youmei, who studied at the Conservatorium der Musik and the University of Leipzig,
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where he received his PhD, and was taught by Hugo Riemann, Wilhelm Wundt, Eduard Spranger, and Arnold Schering, amongst others. Since its inception SCM strived to be on a par with the top conservatories in the West, as reflected by its curriculum and faculty. Shanghai had a large population of foreigners; its number of residents of European origin grew to 150,931 by 1942 (the city’s total population was 3,919,800) (Luo 2016). About half were Russian refugees fleeing the country’s 1917 revolution, many musicians among them. Several cultural organisations performed Western classical music regularly. Some Russian musicians, such as Alexander Tcherepnin, worked to cultivate new Chinese music in a neoRomantic style. Visiting virtuosic musicians included the likes of Arthur Rubinstein and Jascha Heifetz. Even after the Japanese occupation in 1937, the special status of Shanghai’s foreign territory ensured that lively concerts continued. In 1940, Shanghai became a desirable (and visa-free) destination for the large exodus from Germany and Austria, and a popular host for Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis. Refugees associated with the Second Viennese School helped foster China’s first wave of musical modernism. They included Alban Berg’s student, assistant, and copyist Julius Schloss and pianist Karl Steiner, both of whom were closely connected to the Second Viennese School circle. Most influential, though, was Wolfgang Fraenkel, who composed in a free atonal style or using a twelve-tone technique. Having fled a concentration camp near Berlin in 1939, Fraenkel came to Shanghai and taught theory and composition at SCM. From 1941 to 1947, he educated composers who later became the pillars of contemporary music in China. He taught musical analysis both of classical composers and of modernists such as Schoenberg, Hindemith, and Mahler, reflecting his distinctive view of contemporary music. Students later recalled his teaching of Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre and Ernst Kurth’s Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkt. After Fraenkel left for the United States in 1947, Schloss succeeded him at SCM. Both wrote twelve-tone works while in Shanghai. A student, Sang Tong (also known as Zhu Jingqing) composed Yejing [Night Scene] (1947) for violin and piano under Fraenkel’s guidance, and another piece under the direction of Schloss (Cheong 2016). Sang’s compositions were so highly regarded that Steiner played them in the United States Information Service concert series on 18 and 25 April 1948. The concert’s programme notes are indicative: Franz Tsu [referring to Sang Tong], Student of the National Conservatory of Music at Kiangwan and pupil of Professor Julius Schloss with whom he is now studying composition. Professor Schloss considers Mr. Tsu the most talented student he has
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ever had in all his years of teaching composition in China. Mr. Tsu has completed several compositions and hopes to have them performed publicly in the near future. (United States Information Service concert series 1948)
Night Scene, a groundbreaking work, would come to be recognised as the first atonal work by a Chinese composer. Abandoning triadic harmony, Sang used the total chromatic, though with occasional reference to pentatonic sonorities. It is a remarkable first atonal composition, expressing aptly and fluently a new, post-tonal aesthetic. Although Shanghai merely served as a ‘waiting room’ for these refugee musicians on their way to more desirable places, they had an indelible impact. Another significant event for modernism was the return of Tan Xiaolin. In 1946, this outstanding SCM alumnus returned to teach after seven years of studies in the United States. A student of Hindemith at Yale University, Tan was well versed in post-tonal aesthetics and embraced the use of total chromaticism, though preferring to retain some sense of tonality. His teaching of Hindemith’s Unterweisung in Tonsatz (1937) planted the seeds of modernist aesthetics for burgeoning composers and musicians at SCM, including then-violinist Luo Zhongrong, whose importance will be discussed below (p. 283). Tan’s premature death brought his teaching to an abrupt end. Parallel to these students’ enthusiasm for modern music, however, was their stout support for socialism and Communist Party activity in Shanghai. Their burgeoning modernism soon yielded to calls for proletarian music, particularly songs. Luo wrote a proletarian song in 1947 whose immense popularity fuelled the underground communists, and Sang assisted the Red Army in taking over SCM. With the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, little else was possible. Andrei Zhdanov’s famous denouncement in 1948 of so-called ‘formalism’ in the USSR was translated into Chinese and shaped a general rhetoric denouncing modernism. The PRC government banned modern music, regarding it as unfit for its political ideals. A significant publication was the Chinese translation in 1956 of ‘Against the Twelve-Tone System’ by Grigory Shneerson, published just the prior year in Sovietskaya Muzyka, the official organ of the USSR’s Composers’ Union (Schwarz 1965; Ju 2017). The article, which denigrates the twelve-tone concept as a social vice, appeared in People’s Music, the official journal of the Chinese government. Dodecaphony was not alone: 1963 saw Debussy’s music harshly criticised and vilified. Under the Communist regime, there was no modern music visible for nearly three decades (that is, from the 1940s to the late 1970s); even the slightest trait had to be hidden. Luo went on to write upbeat
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orchestral works as resident composer of China’s National Symphony Orchestra. Soviet music textbooks in translation dominated, most notably Textbook of Harmony by Igor Vladimirovich Sposobin, published in 1957. In 1966, the Cultural Revolution began, bringing a virtual halt to most musical activities unsanctioned by the government, as well as to formal education at large. Eight so-called Model Operas that were sanctioned by Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing, were blasted from speakers and radios all over the country and were learned by innumerable performing groups and youngsters. In the political tribulations, Sang and Luo were eventually labelled enemies of the people, condemned, attacked, and imprisoned. Ironically, imprisonment gave Luo time and space to return to modernism clandestinely, by smuggling in pages of Hindemith’s book for study and translation during his detention. He also began learning twelve-tone technique by reading two chapters in Czech composer Ctirad Kohoutek’s book, which was included in official materials as a negative example of formalism, subject to criticism. Modern music continued only in the most surreptitious conditions. In the 1960s, for example, Xiao Shuxian, composer and wife of Hermann Scherchen, secretly shared electronic music he sent to her with students in Beijing, a rare and highly risky act. The rupture of modernism in Chinese music history was significant.
Third Period: Prominence First Twelve-Tone Compositions (1980–1990) After the Cultural Revolution ended, universities and conservatories reopened in 1978. Music was one of the top pursuits, owing in part to the large number of youngsters participating in performing Model Opera. The number of applicants for the Central Conservatory of Music was more than 17,000. A significant political and economic reform swept through the country, and twelve-tone music was again possible, giving rise to two phases of development. The post-Mao era’s introduction of twelve-tone technique constitutes the first phase. In 1979, Luo Zhongrong composed a twelve-tone setting of a poem from the Han Dynasty (206 bc–220 ad) for voice and piano, Picking Lotus Flowers at the Riverside. It was published in 1980 in the March issue of Musical Works, a periodical sponsored by the official Chinese Musicians’ Association showcasing newly composed works. A nod of approval promptly appeared in a leading Beijing-based journal: ‘Comrade Luo’s courageous move into the prohibited zone of twelve-tone
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music should be looked upon as a meaningful exploration’ (Cheong 2016: 92). Recognised as the first twelve-tone composition in China, the work’s critical acclaim prompted many to revisit modern music and adopt dodecaphony. Significant works soon followed, including Chen Mingzhi’s Eight Piano Pieces (1982), which used the tone row from Luo’s Picking Lotus Flowers, Wang Xilin’s Symphonic Suite Impressions of Taihang Mountain (1982), and the Moscow-trained symphonist Zhu Jian’er’s First Symphony (1986). Between 1986 and 1999, Zhu composed ten symphonies, six of which use dodecaphonic practices. Prompted by the outpouring of interest, Sang Tong also published his atonal Night Scene in 1981. Many dodecaphonic works would appear in the next two decades, though these earliest works continued to be frequently discussed, analysed, and anthologised. A pioneer work, Luo’s Picking Lotus Flowers has great musical and poetic appeal, admired to this day. Luo created a pentatonic sonority by excluding non-pentatonic intervals in successive intervals of the tone row, which is saturated with several pentatonic subsets. Luo’s mastery of the subtlety of classic twelve-tone technique is clear. As shown in Figure 17.1a, the tone row contains two orderings of the pentatonic collection related in a palindrome, a design connected to the row’s inversional hexachordal combinatoriality. As the brackets show in Figure 17.1b, the partitions of the tone row yield successions of perfect fifths and fourths articulated in the low register, recalling similar surface details in the bass motion of the opening of Schoenberg’s Fourth String Quartet. The trichord partitioning in b. 8 foreshadows Luo’s future interest in trichordal derived series. Only the quintuplet of demisemiquaver notes in b. 3 provides a quick glimpse of surface pentatonicism. Through skilful unfolding of the aggregate, pentatonic subsets of different rhythms, durations, and densities resonate with one another in a mood of serenity, befitting the poetic expression. A fresh sounding piece is infused with a familiar pentatonic quality. In subsequent works, Luo’s serial thinking continued to evolve with sophisticated derived series and pentatonic designs. Chinese instruments are also incorporated, such as in The Faint Fragrance for zheng and orchestra (1989) and Tune of the Qin for guqin and Western ensemble (1993), the latter of which uses several famous guqin tunes, such as ‘Mist over River’ (Xiao Xiang Shui Yun). Luo’s serial thinking draws from both Hindemith and the Second Viennese School. It would have an indelible influence on the harmonic thinking of his pupils even if they did not adopt serialism, as in the case of Chen Qigang, who navigates through pentatonic space with aggregate completions (Rao 2002).
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(a)
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Figures 17.1a and b Luo Zhongrong’s tone row and Picking Lotus Flowers, bb. 1 8
Following normalisation with the United States in 1979, China’s modern music took a significant English turn. Alexander Goehr’s lectures at the Central Conservatory of Music in 1980 brought a survey, including serialism, for hundreds of students and faculty. This and other visits such as Dieter Acker in 1983 breathed new life into the contemporary scene and had immense influence on the first generation of post-Mao composers seeking new expressive languages. Tan Dun noted, ‘Many professors came, including Goehr, George Crumb, and Takemitsu, and the ’78 class became so hungry, absorbing all kinds of music. But at the same time buried deeply in our own bodies and minds, there is something very special, which is a very earthy and revolutionary kind of feeling’ (‘Composers Tan Dun and Chen Qigang discuss their membership in the Class of 1978’ 2009). Many
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of the new-wave composers in the class of 1978 explored serial practices, amongst them Guo Wenjing, in his violin concerto Tune of Earth (1986–7), Xu Shuya, in his Violin Concerto (1982), Chen Yi, in her piano solo Duo Ye (1984), and Tan Dun, in his string quartet Feng Ya Song (1982). Tan’s string quartet won international recognition with a Dresden Award but also sparked heated debate in People’s Music about whether the twelve-tone technique was adequate for expressing a Chinese sensibility (Chang 1991). Standing on the ruins of the Cultural Revolution, these composers’ pursuit of modern music spoke of hope for a new expression. The antimodern political agenda continued to cast a shadow on the scene, though not enough to stop the new tide. Some teachers such as Luo embraced serialism; others did not but nevertheless shielded young composers’ modernist endeavours from criticism. In this climate, the twelve-tone technique quickly stood out as a tangible method among the multitude of styles. As theorist Zhang Wei poignantly notes, ‘the most astonishing phenomenon is that during this time, almost all Chinese composers, regardless of their ages, gender, and ethnicity, tried their hands at composing with twelvetone technique’. As a result, composers’ individual and personal versions of what they understood to be twelve-tone music gave rise to the important development of home-grown systems of composition. It is estimated that by 1986 there were nearly thirty works using the twelve-tone technique, including many large genres such as concertos, symphonic poems, and film music (Zhang 2017: 25). The method is used by many primarily as a thematic resource.
Theory Texts and Composition Systems (1990–2000) A proliferation of articles and books intensified the spread of serialism in the second phase of its development. Neither performances nor recordings of dodecaphonic or serial works were accessible owing to the lack of libraries and concerts of modern music; composers learned primarily from theory texts. Particularly crucial were the translations of theory books and articles from North America, most notably Allen Forte’s Structure of Atonal Music (1973). Introduced to China as early as 1982, the Chinese translation was published in 1986. George Perle’s Serial Composition and Atonality and Twelve-Tone Tonality were also published in Chinese translation by 1982, though they had less impact. Scholarly work in this area grew quickly: eighty-nine essays on serialism alone were published between 1980 and 1990, along with many more general articles (Wu 2010: 7).
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Zheng Yinglie, Professor of Music at Wuhan Conservatory, was influential in the dissemination of dodecaphony. He began teaching twelve-tone techniques in 1981, and his book, Fundamentals of Serial Music Composition, was published in 1989 (Zheng 2007). He also authored the first English article on serialism in Chinese music (Zheng 1990). Based roughly on Reginald Brindle’s Serial Composition (1986), the book presents a systematic approach to serial technique, listing eight types of serialism: melodic, tonal, atonal, inversional, pentatonic, motivic, all-interval, and derived. Written as a composition manual, Zheng delineates a set of composing principles and analyses canonic twelve-tone works by Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. Although the first Chinese book on serialism, it already draws on many Chinese twelve-tone compositions as examples. The book’s influence spanned the next three decades, and Zheng’s home institution, Wuhan Conservatory, became a powerhouse for the pursuit of serialism, attracting scholars, composers, and students. Chen Yi recalled obtaining a class-note version of Zheng’s book after a conference for young composers held in Wuhan in 1985. Meanwhile, more pedagogical books on serial works were published in which Babbitt’s work was introduced (Wang 1991). New composition systems also emerged, reflecting efforts to infuse serialism with Chinese principles. ‘Taiji Composition System’ was created in 1987 by Zhao Xiaosheng (1945– ), a student of Sang Tong, developing a correlation between pitch and the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching, while incorporating the traditional genre, Tang Daqu, as a formal design (Zhao 1990). The system received critical acclaim and analytical attention, though it was not widely adopted. Other systems of serialism proliferated, with distinctive features such as Wuxing philosophy, a nine-tone scale, and Chinese modal symmetry among others. Serial techniques were adapted in numerous ways, representing different sinicising efforts to express Chinese aesthetics. This trend stems from a long-held obsession about Chinese sensibility in new music. It was perhaps believed that, with a rationale, serialism could offer the search for Chinese sensibility a systematic answer.
Fourth Period (2000–Present): A Method of Structural Coherence In the current period, pentatonicism figures prominently in Chinese composers’ adoption of serialism. As composers gradually move away from strict serial practices, many retain the theoretical arsenal developed from it, such as derivative series, symmetry, or subset manipulations. Jia Daqun explored extensively related structural designs, such as tetrachordal arrays,
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and became an important pedagogue. Serial thinking is retained to varying degrees in the control of sonic unity. Some composers are particularly interested in set theory, using set types as an organising principle but treating aggregate completion with flexibility. Numerous Chinese scholarly publications elucidate the concepts and properties of pitch-class sets. The full impact of set theory became most apparent from the late 1990s to the mid-2010s, culminating in Forte’s visit to China in 2009 as keynote speaker of the inaugural Music Analysis Conference, which attracted 450 attendees from major conservatories and universities. The manifestation of set theory in Chinese compositions likely exceeded any expectations of its author. Set theory became the standard approach not only for post-tonal analysis but also for composition. There have been two unpublished Chinese translations of Andrew Mead’s An Introduction to Milton Babbitt (Mead 1994). Nevertheless, serial practice has gradually receded into the background, as more composers shift their attention to other means of expression in the new cultural atmosphere of the twenty-first century, and as another generation of composers who studied abroad have brought back other eclectic styles and techniques. In Beijing, Stuttgart-trained Jia Guoping, a student of Helmut Lachenmann, constructed series according to the spirit of four characteristic timbres of Chinese guqin in Qing Diao (1998). In Shanghai, Geneva-trained composer Wen Deqing used six-note series as an organising principle in Wu (l’eveil, buddhisme zen) (1995) for soprano, alphorn, and double bass. But currently neither consider serial thinking central to their sonic design.
Other Developments Outside of Communist China, serialism took hold through different paths. A few composers in Hong Kong adopted dodecaphony, among them Chan Hing-yan, who frequently used Webern-like tone rows in scherzo sections of his large works, which feature orchestra with Chinese traditional instruments, as in Hark the Phoenix Soaring High (2010) for sheng and orchestra and There’s Something in the Wind (2005) for dizi and sheng and orchestra. Many composers in Taiwan adopted serial approaches after studying abroad. In Germany, Pan Huanglong began using all-interval series and Webernian symmetry to express Chinese philosophical or mythical concepts in works such as Elements of Change (1979–86). US-trained Lu Yen borrowed tone rows from Webern’s op. 21 and op. 28 for his works such as the Fantasy for Orchestra I (1987) and used serial practices to create an atonal tapestry to foreground Peking opera materials. Tzeng Shing-Kwei,
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who studied in Freiburg between 1977 and 1981, was deeply immersed in serialism and electronic music, while US-trained Pan Shiji has developed a distinctive variety of serialism based on ‘linear cells’ (Sung 2008). One of Pan Shiji’s teachers was Chou Wen-chung, who came to the United States in 1946 and became a protégé and heir of Edgard Varèse. Chou developed distinctive duration series and innovative approaches to hexachordal combinatoriality using ying/yang hexagrams in works such as Windswept Peaks (1995) and Clouds (1996). Several of his famous students, including Chen Yi, Zhou Long, and Lei Liang, adopted serialism as well. Lei’s serial grid (or matrix) is built on a sphere rather than a square, which morphs and transforms its shape constantly, allowing fluidity. With such sophisticated designs, his duration series in Listening for Blossoms (2011) seeks to reflect principles of ink painting and Chinese gardens.
Japan Serialism left limited traces in Japanese contemporary music. However, Japan had a key role in the initial dissemination of dodecaphony in Asia due to its early and systematic approach to Westernisation. The notion of ‘modernism’ in Japan constitutes a historical and artistic epoch starting in the late nineteenth century. Founded in 1887, Tokyo Music School (later Tokyo University of the Arts) was instrumental in the teaching of Western music, which began by establishing exchanges with Germany. Between 1875 and 1914, the Japanese Education Ministry sent 632 students (in all subjects) to Germany, the highest number from any country and almost twice as many as the second highest, Britain (330) (Takenaka 2016: 24). Subsequently, the Japanese musical world became organised according to German aesthetics. The flow of music cultural exchange grew after the First World War. For example, Kiyoshi Nobutoki studied composition in Berlin between 1920 and 1922 and returned to Japan to become a leading figure for the next two decades. Kōsaku Yamada and Saburō Moroi also studied in Berlin and then returned to prominent careers in Japan. Mobility of Japanese students ensured abundant information in Japan about recent modern music in Europe. While the Japanese curriculum remained focused on the German Classic-Romantic canon, works by Scriabin, Bartok, and Stravinsky were also introduced, performed, and studied. Japan’s first music critic, Motoo Ōtaguro, a highly educated music enthusiast who studied in London, was extraordinarily influential, publishing nine books and three translations in the short period between 1915 and
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1920. His writings, while for the general public, earned admiration from trained musicians for his sharp capture of the Zeitgeist (Ogawa and Mori 1988: 91). Many journals were also founded by composers for discussions of Western music theory, aesthetics, and related subjects, and books on technical aspects of music proliferated. As early as the 1910s, articles on Schoenberg and his scores appeared in magazines and books. Schoenberg’s name was introduced to Japan by Ōtaguro, first in a brief passage in From Bach to Schoenberg (1915), then in After Debussy (1920). The latter includes a Japanese translation of ‘Schoenberg and Beyond’ from the Musical Quarterly, an English article originally written in German by Egon Wellesz, Schoenberg’s first private pupil, and translated into English by American scholar Otto Kinkeldey. Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre was translated in 1929. Subsequent books on new music, including a forty-four-page biography of Schoenberg (1933) by Hiroshi Koizumi published in a book series on the world’s contemporary musicians, covered both Schoenberg’s atonality and his twelve-tone technique. Composers adopted the method in various manners; for example, Shūkichi Mitsukuri incorporated a twelve-tone method compatible with the pentatonic system (Yang 2019: 260). Also helpful were sympathetic views towards atonal music such as those of former Mahler pupil, Pringsheim, who worked as a composer/pedagogue and later as conductor of the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. Pringsheim placed atonality firmly in the trajectory of German tradition (Katayama 2007). In the interwar era, several large series of musical scores introducing contemporary music were published, creating a climate for diverse expressions. However, as the military adventurism of the Japanese empire grew and the government gained complete authority to outlaw any form of dissent, composers began to toe the political line more carefully. After Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the Nanking massacre in 1937, effectively initiating the Second World War in the Pacific, militaristic nationalism took over. Publishers came under the control of the government, who monopolised paper distribution and censored content. Music composition became part of the all-nation support system for the totalitarian government and imperial expansion. The end of the Second World War in 1945 precipitated a political, economic, and cultural transformation leading to changes in the styles, idioms, techniques, and ideologies of concert music in Japan. Two forces, separated by the Second World War, were responsible for the roots of twelve-tone music in Japan. The first force appeared in the 1930s. Scores and information about dodecaphony began to be made
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available. For example, the 1931 publication of a series of contemporary piano music in Gesammelte Werke der Weltmusik included Schoenberg’s work. The journal Ongaku Kenkyū [Music Research] released a special issue in 1937 devoted to Schoenberg (Etheridge 2014: 60). Composers took notice. Isotarō Sugata (1907–52), a student of Nobutoki, also studied with Pringsheim and developed an interest in Schoenberg. Even the nationalist Nobutoki was said to have privately studied Schoenberg’s scores and loaned the scores to Moroi, who himself connected the twelve-tone technique to folk song in an attempt to develop an abstract theory of music (Chōko Seiji, quoted in Janz 2019: 295). Moroi’s students would go on to form important post-war trends of composition in 1946 as a part of the group named Shinseikai [Group of New Voices]. During the war, composers either were silent or undertook modernist pursuits clandestinely. Sugata did not write in a style derived from Schoenberg until 1946, when he composed a string quartet and an orchestral piece, Picasso’s Picture (Katayama 2007). An interesting example was Kunihiko Hashimoto (1904–49), who was introduced to Berg during his studies in Vienna between 1934 and 1937, then travelled to Los Angeles to study with Schoenberg. According to his famous student Toshirō Mayuzumi, Hashimoto secretly made a prototype of his later approach to twelve-tone technique during the war. The second force in Japanese serialism started after the close of the war, when the nationalist ideology no longer ruled and censorship was lifted. During the period of American occupation and even beyond, an atmosphere of free exploration was supported by new institutions such as the library of the American Cultural Center in Tokyo (Wade 2014: 62–4). There were three prominent groups critical to the post-war development of serialism. The most important of these was Shinseikai, a group of academic composers formed in 1946 by Moroi’s students, Minao Shibata and Yoshirō Irino. Another pupil, Kunio Toda, chanced upon René Leibowitz’s Schoenberg et son école (1947) while being detained at the end of the war in Indochina. He brought the book back to Japan in 1948 and joined Shinseikai, with whom he began to pursue dodecaphony seriously. Shibata and Irino became key exponents in Japan, and Shinseikai constituted the leading group of serialists for the following decade (Deguchi 2019: 304). Irino’s Concerto da Camera for Seven Instruments (1951) is recognised as the first Japanese twelve-tone work. Later, he also serialised rhythm. As a proponent of dodecaphony, Irino wrote an introductory book on twelvetone music in 1953, authored many introductory journal articles, and made
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Japanese translations of Josef Rufer’s Die Komposition mit Zwölf Tönen (1952) as well as several other texts, including Leibowitz’s book in 1965 (Sawabe 1992: 37–9; Galliano 2002: 174). He would continue to refine his twelve-tone technique, while incorporating Japanese instruments in distinctive ways, as in Ongaku for two kotos (1957). He founded the Institute of Twentieth-Century Music, which later sponsored Japan’s version of Darmstadt. Shibata’s dodecaphony work in mid-century includes Asa no uta [Morning Song] (1962), which uses existing series from Berg’s cantata Der Wein, a practice he continued for several more works. He later turned to aleatory, electronic, and other avant-garde approaches. Associated with this group was also Makoto Moroi, son of Saburō. In 1953, he won two international awards for his twelve-tone works: Partita for Flute (1952) won a prize awarded by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and Composition No. 1 (1951–3) was awarded seventh prize in the Queen Elizabeth Competition. He would be credited with introducing audiences to works of serialism and aleatory music. Meanwhile, a generation of self-taught composers committed to Japanese and Western fusion became interested in serialism as well. They were formerly members of the New Composer League founded in 1930, which was interrupted by the war and, in 1946, reconstituted as the Japanese Society for Contemporary Music (later becoming a branch of ISCM), led by Yoritsune Matsudaira. The group also included Hashimoto, Jōji Yuasa, and Fumio Hayasaka. Matsudaira composed and wrote actively in his youth but went silent during wartime. His style shifted from impressionism to neoclassicism, then to serialism with extended influence of gagaku. In 1952 he won an ISCM prize at Salzburg with Theme and Variations for Piano and Orchestra (1951) based on a popular gagaku tune, Etenraku, whose expressive constraints and neutral quality resonated with him. Its third variation employs serial techniques, where three twelvetone rows are derived from intervallic relationships found in Etenraku (Matsudaira and Benítez 1998). The first tone row is based on the first tetrachord of the ryūteki (flute) line of the Etenraku melody. Figure 17.2 shows (a) the Etenraku melody, (b) a derived series comprising the melody’s first tetrachord, its retrograde, and inversion, and (c) the piano opening of Variation III. In his later works, Matsudaira derives most of his tone rows from gagaku. Winning international prizes, he gained significant reception, first in Paris and Darmstadt, then elsewhere in Europe, making a strong impression. Matsudaira was one of the few composers who continued to develop his serial thinking after it was no longer in vogue in Japan.
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Figures 17.2a, b, and c Gagaku melody, tone row, and Yoristsune Matsudaira, ‘Variations’, bb. 1 3
The third group is Jikken Kobo [Experimental Workshop], formed in 1951 by Yuasa, Mayuzumi, Hayasaka, and Tōru Takemitsu, as well as artists, poets, and performers. It was a young group exploring many different media and new languages of which serialism was only one. Between 1953 and 1954, they studied intensely works of Schoenberg and Webern. At the Sogetsu Art Centre, concerts began in 1958, and a contemporary concert series was established in 1960 to feature a wide spectrum of artistic voices, involving many leading composers of the postwar art music scenes. Yuasa’s work Projection for Seven Players (1955/56) is a study of twelve-tone technique, whose structure also demonstrates an elaboration of the music of Japanese Noh drama. As issues of temporality, space, and existentialism were central to Yuasa’s work, he sometimes used serialised rhythm to achieve certain temporal effects, though not consistently, and he later abandoned serialism (Galliano 2018: 15–33). Similarly, while Takemitsu’s distinctive style does not cohere with any monolithic idea of serialism, he also briefly engaged with dodecaphonic approaches, especially Webernian ones, from the end of the 1950s to the early 1960s. It coincided with the period of composing Requiem for Strings (1957), the work that famously caught Stravinsky’s attention during his trip to Tokyo in 1959; his high praise brought Takemitsu widespread recognition. The
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work employed several of Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition, demonstrating a close attention to pitch organisation. His dodecaphonic or partial-serial works include Le Son Calligraphié I, III (1958, 1960), Maque (1959), Pause Interrompue (1952–60), Piano Distance (1961), Ring (1961), Sacrifice (1962), and Hika (1966) (Deguchi 2019: 318; Burt 2006: 50–82). The use of retrograde and inversion – a reversal of musical succession – commonly seen in these works has lasting influence on his oeuvre in his use of mirrors and palindromes (Burt 2006: 56–8). The 1960s also brought a visit from John Cage and David Tudor in 1962, and the advent of experimentalism and radical avant-gardism. Serialism quickly declined in Japan, however: Yoritsune Matsudaira’s work would receive more performances in Europe than in Japan. Composers born after the Second World War also studied serialism overseas. The most prominent among them is Toshio Hosokawa, who studied in Berlin with Isang Yun, then in Freiburg with Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough. While schooled in advanced serialism, Hosokawa remained deeply enculturated in the unique instrumental timbre of Japanese music, such as the different types of flute including nohkan in the music of the Noh theatre, kagurabue, komabue, and ryūteki in gagaku, as well as the various genres surrounding the music of the shakuhachi such as the slow, free-rhythm honkyoku. In his Vertical Song I for flute (1995), serialism is combined with a large number of extended techniques in a search for new sonorities. He notes, ‘I often utilized new playing techniques because I was interested in the meaning they had in the realm of modern music – the creation of tones which have an alien effect and the discovery of new instrumental sounds which hadn’t existed before’ (Hosokawa 1995).
Korea Korea endured significant foreign interventions and changes of ruling regimes in the twentieth century, which shaped its development of serialism. As part of its modernisation process in the late nineteenth century, Korea accepted Protestant Christianity as its religion of all classes. Western music such as bands and hymns were introduced by US missionaries. Numerous anthologies of hymns with Korean lyrics were published, and hymn singing was actively practised and appropriated by Koreans in the pursuit of ‘Christian modernity’ (Choi 2009: 10–11). In 1910, following the first Sino-Japanese war, Korea became a colony of Japan. The end of the Second World War in 1945 marked the restoration of freedom for Korea,
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though it also led to the intervention of the US military. Following the debilitating Korean War (1950–3), the division of the country into communist North and capitalist South resulted in their separate development and prolonged American involvement in South Korean society. Under Japan’s colonisation, Korea’s Indigenous music was suppressed, and Austrian-German music and hymns with Japanese texts were used to indoctrinate the colonised in the Japanese empire. Korean composers underwent schooling with a Western music curriculum and advanced their study in Japan and the United States, the first group of whom included Un-Yung La, who studied with Saburō Moroi in Japan. Songs became the most popular genre. After the Second World War, the first co-educational music college based on European models was established at Seoul National University (SNU) in 1946. Meanwhile, Indigenous music was given the name gugak [national music], which the National Gugak Center shaped into the canon of traditional music. In the post-war period, South Korean composers of Western music confronted, as post-colonial subjects, the dual challenge of regaining their cultural heritage and identity/-ies and continuing or even catching up with the most recent trends of Western music, namely the pursuit of musical modernism. Owing to its colonial history, many mid-century Korean composers became interested in modern music via Japan. Sun-nam Kim, who studied in Tokyo between 1937 and 1943, was one of Korea’s first composers to use twelve-tone technique. His 1946 piano concerto exhibited stark atonality. After moving to North Korea in 1948, however, he faced the internal campaign against communists who came from South Korea. His work was censored, and he was sent to be a factory worker. In 1952, the Korean Society of Contemporary Music was established in Seoul; its founder was Un-Yung La, whose ‘Enigma’, the third of his Six Preludes for Piano, was premiered in 1955, Korea’s first twelve-tone piano piece. ‘Enigma’ received wide attention and was followed by more interest in atonality and serialism. La would continue to play an important role as a writer, pedagogue, and composer. In the late 1950s, desire to catch up with modern musical trends prompted composers to pursue their study of dodecaphony in Europe. Isang Yun and Nam-June Paik represented the first generation to follow this path. Isang Yun was born into a traditional literati family. Like other musicians during colonisation, Yun went to Japan in the 1930s – first to Osaka and then Tokyo – where between 1940 and 1941 he studied with Paris-trained composer Tomojirō Ikenouchi. Returning to Korea, he joined the anti-Japanese resistance while teaching music, gaining
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a reputation as an avant-garde composer and founding the Association of Korean Composers. The Korean War that began in 1950 hampered creativity, but many continued to study modern techniques through books and scores from abroad. After the war, Yun taught at several Seoul universities, where he encountered a Japanese translation of Rufer’s book, which inspired him to study more advanced techniques in Europe. He first went to Paris (1956–7) and, at the end of 1957, to the Musikhochschule Berlin to study with Boris Blacher and Rufer himself. In 1958, he went to Darmstadt and encountered works of more recent serialists such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna, and Luigi Nono, as well as Cage and Matsudaira. The latter’s orchestral work U-mai (1957) became the catalyst for Yun’s own approach to serialism. His Music for Seven Instruments (1959) combines Schoenbergian serialism with Korean court music aesthetics and received critical acclaim at Darmstadt in 1959. He incorporated serialism with (unserialised) timbral characteristics of Korean instrumental ornamentation such as intense vibrato, trills, and coloratura. In his chamber work Loyang (1962) and the orchestral piece Réak (1966), he developed his distinctive serial style using the concept of a Hauptton [principal tone], as well as numerous ways of integrating Korean court music, folk music, philosophy, religion, and other cultural aspects of Korean tradition such as the Asian mouth organ (Kim 2012). On the score of Loyang, he noted the use of the ancient Chinese court music ‘Nagyangch’un’ [Spring in Loyang]. Yun settled in Europe after the success of his Buddhist oratorio Om mani padme hum in 1965. The work incorporates a serial melody alongside formal Buddhist chant, as well as echoes of crickets, running water, and wind chimes. However, in 1967 Yun was abducted by the government of Park Chung-Hee and transported to South Korea and sentenced to life on charges of espionage. It was part of the large international round-up orchestrated by South Korea’s Central Intelligence Agency. After appeals from the international community that included, amongst others, Stravinsky, Ligeti, and Stockhausen, he was released to hospitalisation in 1968 in Seoul and eventually returned to Germany in 1971. There he stayed and taught a generation of prominent Korean composers including Sukhi Kang, Byung-Dong Paik, and Chung-Gil Kim, as well as other Asian composers such as Toshio Hosokawa and Pan Huanglong. In South Korea, however, Yun’s continuing critique of the ruling regime remained a source of tension, and performances of his music were obstructed whenever less liberal administrations were in power (Chang 2020).
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Yun’s contemporary, Nam-June Paik, took quite a different route. Paik moved with his family to Hong Kong and then Japan, where he received a BA in Aesthetics from the University of Tokyo in 1956, with a thesis on Schoenberg. Intent on studying serialism, Paik, too, went to Germany. He attended Darmstadt at the same time as Yun, where he met Stockhausen and Cage. Almost immediately abandoning serialism, he was attracted by Cage’s works and ideas and became a member of the Fluxus movement by 1962, establishing himself as an experimentalist. After the Vietnam War and the normalisation of relations with Japan, South Korea rose on the world stage. This status intensified its quest for a national identity, particularly in the 1970s, as the public slogan of the Park regime during this time was ‘Cultural Korea’, a marker of the country’s attempts to revive traditional culture. Composers had heated debates, which examined critically how Western music could serve as a vehicle for expressing and advancing Korean tradition and aesthetics. Meanwhile, the second generation of South Korean composers, many of whom studied at SNU, became more familiar with Western contemporary music through journals and community forums introducing serial, atonal, and electronic idioms and extreme avant-garde styles. Sukhi Kang was a leading figure. He visited Isang Yun regularly in 1968 during Yun’s incarceration in Seoul (Kang 1992). In 1969, he started the Pan Music Festival, on the Darmstadt model, in Seoul, which would become a crucial forum showcasing contemporary music. In 1970, upon Yun’s suggestion, both Kang and Byung-Dong Paik furthered their training in Germany, establishing a strong tie between Germany and South Korea. Kang met more contemporary composers, including Yuasa, and encountered new works of European modernists. He settled into studying engineering and music and developed a distinctive modern style. For example, in Nong for flute and piano (1970), Kang adopted serialism’s notion of chromaticism without an ordered tone row to depict traditional shamanic ritual dance, while also incorporating Korean traditional rhythmic patterns (changtan). Register, pitch contents, and dynamic markings also became closely controlled to express the haphazardness and volatility of the shamanic spirit (Lee 2017). Kang returned to Korea in 1975 to teach at SNU but later divided his time between Korea and Germany, becoming a highly respected composer of his generation in both countries, with students including Junsang Bahk, Unsuk Chin, and Shinuh Lee (Babcock 1995). In particular, Lee noted that Kang’s teaching, which emphasized the importance of balance and structure, was influential, and that she used total serialism as a tool to express herself (interview with Shinuh Lee, 22 December 2021).
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Like Kang, Byung-Dong Paik was also influenced by his study with Yun to explore the combination of Asian philosophy with modern techniques. A SNU alumnus, he was also influenced by Sun-nam Kim’s twelve-tone work. Paik noted too that Moroi’s books on functional harmony and counterpoint were key texts for musicians in the 1950s (Lee 2017: 257). His serialism is closely intertwined with his sense of national identity, which is expressed primarily through the use of melody (Killick 1992; Kim 1990). His Un/Rhythme series (1970) uses rhythmic grouping and grouping of melodic flurries that reflect his national identity, as well as retrograde structure. Pitch-class sets are also used, replacing the strict use of tone rows (Lee 2017: 254–70). The score, which requires precise execution of the notation, often obscures a sense of pulse. Paik returned to South Korea in 1971 and spent his career almost exclusively in his homeland, partly because he considered his music best performed by Korean or Asian musicians. Another SNU alumna, Younghi Pagh-Paan, studied in Freiburg with Huber and Ferneyhough from 1974 to 1979, before establishing herself in Germany. Employing serial thinking, she adopted a more lyrical and ornamental treatment. In her well-received Ma-Nam I (1977), she devised a timeless flow, interleaving instruments which share a common lyrical thread. The instrumental timbres are supplemented by Korean ornamentation that creates a heterophonic texture within a monophonic structure (Howard 2006: 136). The 1970s and 1980s saw modern music proliferate in Korea, as composers returned from their studies in Germany bringing a new ‘rationalism’ in the form of compositional technique and theory. Organisations such as Chang-ak-hoe (established in 1958) and the Korean division of the ISCM (established 1971), as well as the magazine Monthly Music, became important conduits for new music. In 1977, Chou Wen-chung gave a keynote speech at the Sixth International Arts Symposium, echoing Yun’s notion of the tone as ‘a musical entity in itself’ (Lee 2017: 267–8). Across these decades, serialism was the most prominent approach. The 1980s opened with one of the most violent civil uprisings in the modern history of Korea. With his assassination, President Park ChungHee’s twelve-year-long dictatorial regime came to a sudden end, and protests for democratic civil rights emerged throughout the country. According to musicologist Jung-Min Mina Lee, the underlying attitude was a general distrust of authority and the West, which was considered suspect owing to its support for the previous ruling regime. The situation led to the rise of a ‘Third Generation’, led by Lee Geon-Yong, which began to question the reliance on Western modernist idioms. Composers sought
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a fresh mode to express national identity, aiming at a creative transmission of traditional culture. Interests in serialism and Western modern idioms were replaced by newer aesthetics. Unsuk Chin, an alumna of SNU who also studied with Kang in the 1980s, received international attention before travelling to Hamburg to study with Ligeti. There, she would also abandon serialism, while further disavowing any nationalist intent or cultural connection to Korea, and instead embrace spectral and electronic techniques.
Conclusion Asia had a long history of incorporating Western music into its society before dodecaphony was introduced. Conservatories and universities also had been established in the European music mould, with a strong focus on the German Classic-Romantic canon (Everett 2004: 1–21). Thus, Asian composers’ foray into atonality and dodecaphony, which was considered an extension of the tradition, is unsurprising. Japan, as the first country in Asia to fully embrace Westernisation and itself a coloniser, played a major role in the initial dissemination of the concept. What might be considered separate introductions of dodecaphony in different countries were in fact connected to Japan through an active network of ideas, print media, and movement of people in the region, owing in no small part to Japan’s colonising history. Japanese music critic Ōtaguro’s prolific writings aided the circulation of the concept through translation into Chinese (Ōtaguro 1931), and the publication of several comprehensive series of music scores focused on European contemporary music in Japan also popularised early atonal music in the region. Schoenberg’s portrait on a 1927 magazine cover in Beijing likely came via Japan. Moroi’s pupils pioneered dodecaphony in both Japan and Korea (Un-Yung La). The impact of Irino’s seminal texts such as the 1957 Japanese translation of Rufer’s Composition reached beyond his group Shinseikai in Japan to inspire Korean composers such as Yun. Despite their shared resources, however, colonial histories, civil wars, political reforms, and imperial agendas determined whether or not (and when) composers had the liberty to explore dodecaphony. In the early 1940s, China was very close to developing dodecaphonic compositions, given Shanghai’s unique foreign territory and the refugee Second Viennese School musicians the cosmopolitan city attracted. Sang Tong’s Night Scene stands witness to aspiring atonal expression, and Luo Zhongrong’s success in 1980 could be deemed to have sprouted from an extraordinarily long
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germinating period of creative seeds sowed in the 1940s. Chinese composers at large were prohibited from ‘formalism’ after the establishment of the PRC in 1949, and their adoption of twelve-tone technique and serialism thirty years later coincided with the earnest effort to ‘catch up’ and ‘make up’ for the prolonged vacuum of contemporary music. The post-Mao introduction of dodecaphony was a late arrival, which explains the outpouring of creativity and strong interest surrounding serialism for two decades at the end of the century, and the enduring commitment to set theory (as a well-developed technique for analysing dodecaphony) well into the early part of the twenty-first century. From this perspective, the imprint of serialism on Chinese contemporary music, though delayed, is significant. In sharp contrast, despite Japanese composers’ initial earnestness and enthusiasm for dodecaphony in the mid-century, both in composition and publication, it did not gain prominence, despite the continuing efforts of Matsudaira and Yuasa. Dodecaphony is now regarded as largely inconsequential to the history of Japanese contemporary music, where the socalled ‘Cage Shock’ cast a longer shadow and had significant influence. As a result, Japanese composers such as Hosokawa in the late 1970s learned serialism elsewhere, mainly from Yun in Germany, whose first exposure and breakthrough were, ironically, provided by Japanese composers (Wade 2014: 75–6). Moreover, although newly decolonised mid-century Korean composers felt the urgent need to ‘catch up’ with modern compositional technique by pursuing dodecaphony, South Korea could be said to have established the steadiest and most continuous development of serialism in Asia (Lee 2017: 6). Although encumbered by continuing warfare and political division, serialism in Korea has been pursued and employed thoughtfully to express traditional aesthetics by several generations of the country’s most prominent composers throughout their creative output. It has also contributed to the development of serialism beyond the region of East Asia. Most significantly, as a prominent composer in Germany, Isang Yun, in Berlin, together with colleagues in Freiburg, educated generations of Asian composers in advanced serial thinking.
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Contexts ii
18
Towards an Authentic Interpretation of Serial Music peter o’hagan
The pianist Peter Stadlen worked intensively with Webern on the Variations for Piano op. 27 during the autumn of 1937 prior to giving the first performance of the work, and his testimony is the most detailed of any of the first generation of interpreters of the music of the Second Viennese School: Although for Webern, as distinct from Schoenberg, the dodecaphonic scheme made a vital contribution to the beauty of a work, he never once referred to that aspect during our meetings which continued for several weeks. Even when I asked, he refused to talk about it what mattered, he said, was for me to learn how the piece ought to be played, not how it is made. And indeed, he never tired conveying to me the poetics of the work down to the minutest, most delicate detail conducting, gesticulating, singing (he never played). (Stadlen 1979)
His comments echo those of the pianist Edward Steuermann and the violinist Rudolph Kolisch, who were able to work directly with Schoenberg and emphasised his reluctance to engage in any discussion of twelve-note technique. One might speculate that this uncharacteristic coyness could well derive from a realisation that emphasis on the organisation of a single component – pitch – could inhibit the integration of all the musical parameters into a convincing interpretation. Be that as it may, the unsubstantiated assertion which opens Stadlen’s account is perhaps more revealing about his own attitude to serial processes than it is about their relative function in the works of Webern and Schoenberg, yet its implications are certainly worth further exploration. Notwithstanding the fact that the order of the basic series itself has not been without musicological controversy and misinterpretation, the Variations op. 27 demonstrate a rigour in the application of dodecaphonic technique which render a purely pitch-based analysis unproblematic (cf. Smith 1986: 210–11). By comparison, even Schoenberg’s first twelve-note works, with their comparatively greater textural variety and occasional use of serial permutation, I am very grateful to the curator of the Webern collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, Dr Simon Obert, for his kind assistance, for discussing with me various matters relevant to this chapter, and for his assistance with the figures used within it.
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can present intractable difficulties in terms of analysis of pitch order. The problem is certainly not confined to the Second Viennese composers: the first piece of Boulez’s Structures could almost have been conceived with the lecture hall in mind, yet commentators have been wary of attempting a similar cataloguing of serial procedures in the remainder of the cycle, and with good reason, since it is stating the obvious to point out that any perceived overemphasis on technical matters presupposes that the serial processes themselves yield their secrets to the analyst. If, in the case of Webern, the transparency of his serial technique can be credited with a ‘vital contribution’ to the perceived ‘beauty’ of a work, how are we to approach the acknowledged link between aesthetic effect and technical means? Fortunately, Webern’s own comments can assist in considering this question: The original form and pitch of the row occupy a position akin to the ‘main key’ in earlier music; the recapitulation will naturally return to it. We end ‘in the same key!’ This analogy with earlier formal construction is quite consciously fostered; here we find the path that will lead us again to extended forms. (Webern 1963: 54)
To pursue this analogy with traditional form a little further, the recapitulation in classical music can indeed be sensed by the listener, but a greater level of awareness of the technical processes is desirable in order to appreciate, for example, the sophisticated humour of a false recapitulation in Haydn or the structural logic behind the subtle changes which might occur in the recapitulation itself. Similarly, whilst the ‘recapitulation’ which occurs in the closing section of the Webern Variations can be sensed intuitively on one level, richer layers of meaning can be revealed by technical investigation. Thus, an analytical strategy which takes account of the return of the series and its retrograde at the original pitch but goes on to a holistic consideration of its deployment in the context of the parameters of rhythm, texture, register, and dynamics is likely lead to an enhanced appreciation of this coda and its function not only as a recapitulation within the third movement, but also as a series of allusions to the opening of the work. Such an approach has none of the certainties of an analysis focused exclusively on dodecaphonic technique, since it is inevitably subject to a personal interpretation of the balance between the component elements, yet it reflects the fact that the score can yield its richness on many levels. Similarly, the characteristic canons and crab canons which are such a feature of the form of each of the three movements of the Variations can be shaped as component elements in the overall phrase structure without the need for understanding the means by which
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this balance is achieved, or conscious awareness of the convergence between the ‘form’ of the series itself and its elaboration during the course of the work. However, given this perceived convergence between form and technique, Webern’s distinction between ‘how the piece ought to be played, not how it is made’ is a somewhat artificial and potentially restricting one. A performer seeking ways into the style of the music might well decide that precisely such an investigation can lead to a more musically aware interpretation of phrasing and musical structure. Stadlen’s experience is particularly significant, as his comments form part of the introduction to an annotated score, consisting of markings in the composer’s hand and a transcription of additional comments made during the course of these coaching sessions. As such, although the Stadlen score has been the subject of earlier studies, it is well worth revisiting for the number of issues it raises (Wason 1987; cf. Boynton 2002). First, it must be acknowledged unequivocally that the annotated copy is of the greatest practical help to any performer of the work, with its clarification of phrase structure, indications of tempo modifications, expressions of musical character, and additional dynamic and pedal markings. Judging by the extent and nature of the markings, Webern must have worked in fanatical detail, and yet it is no disrespect to the value of the Stadlen score to affirm, as Neil Boynton has observed (Boynton 2002), that the annotations themselves are the product of a composer’s reaction to the playing of an individual during a series of what were in effect coaching sessions on an instrument with its own unique properties of touch and sound quality, in acoustic conditions which cannot be replicated. Broadly speaking, the markings fall into two categories: those that convey details of phrasing and registral connections (the what to do) which may well be taken at face value, and such added details of internal balance in chords and pedal markings (the how to achieve it) which are the product of a coaching session with an individual performer and are therefore of a more provisional nature. Given his reluctance to discuss technical issues related to serialism, it seems highly unlikely that Webern would have shared with Peter Stadlen details of the evolution of the work, and indeed the source material remained unavailable for scholarly perusal for some forty years after the composer’s death. However, investigation of this material can help shed additional light on Webern’s annotations, and on their relationship to the formal processes of the work. The sketches reveal that the opening movement was originally conceived in quintuple time, a stage which was eventually superseded by the greater visual clarity of the published triple metre (cf. Bailey 1995; Boynton 2009). Turning again to Webern’s annotations, the seemingly
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inconsistent tenuti marks in the opening system of the first movement reveal themselves as a series of articulations within a series of 5 bars, 16 subdividing each bar into units of 3 + 2. One cannot help but wonder whether if Webern had shared this information with the young Stadlen, a similar interpretive result might have been achieved, and with it an enhanced understanding of the rhythmic character of the movement – an explanation of the underlying creative impulse rather than a series of injunctions. Further practical insights, unavailable to an earlier generation of performers, are yielded by even a superficial examination of the drafts for the work. For example, remarkably, an early version of the theme of the third movement contains no fewer than seven changes of tempo, with the contrasts between piano and forte phrases accompanied by ritardandi. The effect, along with the reduced note values of the original 3 time-signature is 8 to alter one’s perception of the movement as being much more fluid in character than the rather ascetic appearance of the published score with its 3 2 signature might suggest. Why Webern would have omitted these markings from the score is something of a mystery, especially in view of his concern that the swiftly changing character of his music be communicated in a flexible way. The existence of such a secondary source does not undermine the legitimacy of the published version, but it is an illustration of the fact that all scores, however detailed their notational exactitude, are provisional in their status as records of the composer’s intentions. A further effect of the quadrupling of note values in the published edition is the loss of the connecting beams which were present in profusion in the early sketches. For example, a draft of the first variation in the third movement has a series of connections as shown in Figure 18.1. One might note in passing the recasting of b. 14 into two bars in order that the eleven-bar proportions remain consistent throughout the movement, but more significant is the range of new connections articulated by the original beams. If these groupings are articulated in the context of the comments relating to musical character in the Stadlen score, an enhanced interpretive richness and understanding results. Even more remarkable is the comparison between the printed score and a draft of what became the fourth variation (the inconsistency of bar numbering with the published score is a consequence of the subsequent decision to eliminate two variations). The hand-crossing which is feature of the printed score (bb. 45–56) can encourage a disjointed approach to interpreting this passage, as can the late decision to emphasise the syncopated character of the variation by means of rhythmic displacements and the addition of accents. One can well imagine the dialogue which occurred between composer and interpreter
Towards an Authentic Interpretation of Serial Music
Figure 18.1 Anton Webern, draft of first variation, third movement of Piano Variations op. 27, bb. 12 23
Figure 18.2 Anton Webern, draft of fourth variation, third movement of Piano Variations op. 27, bb. 56 66
as Webern added pedal marks and indications of phrasing to the score, all features which are implicitly present in the groupings and layout of the original draft (see Figure 18.2). Returning to the first movement of the Variations, even more puzzling than the tenuti marks in the opening bars are the dynamic gradations (< >) placed over individual notes. Stadlen offers the following by way of explanation: ‘The unrealisable “vibrato” signs in bars 2 and 3 . . . which Webern
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wrote in my copy, give an idea of the cool, passionate lyricism of expression that he envisioned here’ (Stadlen 1972). Again, an awareness of the context provides an additional perspective on these markings. A letter to Hildegard Jone of 2 September 1937 contains the information that Webern had just put the final touches to a movement for String Quartet. Bearing in mind that the coaching sessions with Stadlen took place in the early autumn of that year, it seems highly likely that Webern had the sonority of the quartet movement very much in his mind at the time and was thinking in terms of the expressive qualities of string instruments as he worked with the young pianist. It is noteworthy that the close of the first movement of the String Quartet op. 28 contains precisely the same dynamic markings – in this context, of course, eminently realisable on string instruments. It could even be the case that in revisiting the piano work during these coaching sessions, Webern might well have become more consciously aware of the quartetlike texture of much of the writing in the first movement of the Variations for Piano. In view of the information that was not available to Peter Stadlen at the time, his later assertion that, in Webern’s op. 27, ‘an authentic interpretation is impossible without the aid of direct, detailed tradition’ (Stadlen 1979) has to be read in the context of his aversion to the multiple serialism of the post-war period, and (as he saw it) the various – and differing – misinterpretations of Webern’s legacy by the Darmstadt generation (see, inter alia, Iddon 2013: 89–100). It is certainly the case that for Stadlen, charged with the responsibility of the first performance, direct access to the composer’s thoughts on interpretation was an important factor in his desire to achieve a performance in accordance with Webern’s wishes – an ‘authentic’ interpretation. Yet the very existence of the Stadlen annotated copy is an admission that the printed score cannot in itself be a comprehensive record of the composer’s intentions, and one might well argue that given the limited performance directions in the published scores, Webern was himself an unwitting contributor to any perceived misinterpretation of his musical legacy. Just as Stadlen’s annotated score offers a counterbalance to an ‘objective’ view of Webern, so musicological research can assist in further clarifying the composer’s intentions – hence assisting in achieving an authentic performance, but one in which the emphasis has subtly shifted from an authenticity based on the composer’s personal intervention to one involving a re-assessment of source material which was unavailable to the first generation of performers. After all, in the final analysis, concern for authenticity is a state of mind in the performer, rather than a checklist of criteria in need of constant updating. As such, the
Towards an Authentic Interpretation of Serial Music
term constantly shifts its focus, as research uncovers fresh evidence relevant to interpretation, and succeeding generations of performers bring their own perspectives and insights to the work in question. *** Following the resumption of musical life in Germany after the Second World War, Peter Stadlen gave the German premiere of the Variations on 31 July 1948 at the Darmstadt New Music Courses. Within a year of this performance, Olivier Messiaen was invited to Darmstadt to give a performance of his Visions de l’Amen (partnered by Yvonne Loriod), and during his brief visit, he evidently worked on a new piano piece, ‘Mode de valeurs et d’intensités’. Strictly speaking, Messiaen has no part in a discussion of dodecaphonic technique, since however radical a departure it represents, the organisation of the four parameters of pitch, rhythm, attacks, and dynamics in ‘Mode de valeurs’ is based on a free ordering of the component elements, without the constraints imposed by strictly serial procedures. Nonetheless, the piece had a profound influence on the younger generation of serial composers, to the extent that the three projected volumes of Boulez’s Structures were in effect both a homage to, and a critique of, ‘Mode de valeurs’, each book to be based in turn on the three pitch scales of Messiaen’s piece, but employed serially. It unfortunately remains the case that the works of this brief period of multiple serialism are analysed much more frequently than they are performed, and for the good reason that they present seemingly intractable problems. On one level, performance of a work that specifies a duration, mode of attack, and dynamic for each individual note ought to be relatively unproblematic. After all, the composer’s intentions have been indicated unequivocally in seemingly unsparing detail. Furthermore, Stadlen’s concern for authenticity, rooted in a direct connection with a performing tradition, is taken to a new level by the availability of recordings involving the composer as executant in his own music. All in all, the aspiring performer of contemporary music is seemingly endowed with an unprecedented richness of source material on which to base an interpretation, and yet this plethora of information is a somewhat mixed blessing. Turning to Messiaen’s own recording of ‘Mode de valeurs’, the playing time is a fairly sedate 3′52″, and his performance is a valuable document, not only for his exemplary playing, but for the numerous (almost inevitable) inconsistencies with his own notational exactitude. Equally fascinating are the timings of recordings by two pianists most associated with Messiaen, who worked
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closely with the composer – Yvonne Loriod (3′25″) and Michel Béroff (2′ 37″). Leaving aside for a moment the considerable interpretive differences between these performances, notwithstanding the unparalleled precision of the markings, the discrepancies in timing alone are startling – the smallscale equivalent of comparing recordings of a classical symphony of half an hour (Béroff) and forty minutes duration (Messiaen). Given such discrepancies, how is one to approach the music of the period of multiple serialism in pursuit of an ‘authentic’ performance? The word ‘pointillist’ is frequently (and misleadingly) appropriated as a generic description for the instrumental works of the post-war period, prompted by the visual appearance of scores comprised of a succession of seemingly self-sufficient sounds coalescing into a whole. The paintings of the pointillist group are notable for their dazzling use of timbre, with a constantly fluctuating use of tiny variations of colour as the tones gradually merge. An equivalent representation of such variations of timbre is impossible within the boundaries of musical notation, and this limitation is both a reminder of the provisional status of a written score, and an important factor to bear in mind when seeking to come to terms with scores seemingly already overloaded with performance indications. In the case of ‘Mode de valeurs’, the opening note, E♭, appears in the top part with its register, dynamic (ppp), and mode of attack (legato) unchanged throughout the entire piece. Yet the context in which this note is heard is constantly changing and, although Messiaen for the most part avoids direct clashes, the pitch inevitably takes on a different character and an individual pianistic colour according to its context: in other words, the performer may perfectly justifiably feel the necessity to adjust the dynamic level according to context – when, for example, it appears against the background of a resonating fff B♭ in the bass on the second page, or is sounded directly against a forte C♮ in the middle register at the top of the penultimate page. Rather than being censured as transgressions, such adjustments, whether of dynamics, methods of attack, or almost undetectable changes of timing, are a means of realising the expressive character of the music, and as such are in the tradition of Webern’s annotations in the Variations for Piano. That the piece is subject to quite varied approaches, even by those artists who have a claim to work within a direct and authentic tradition, is no more than an illustration of the role of the individual interpreter in observing the spirit, rather than the strict letter communicated by the score. On 4 May 1952, Messiaen joined with the composer to give the premiere of the first piece of Boulez’s two-piano work, Structures – a public demonstration of rapprochement, following a period of cool artistic and personal
Towards an Authentic Interpretation of Serial Music
relations between master and former student. In an interview some two years before his death in 2016, Boulez was asked about his approach as a performer to Structure Ia, and his reply began: ‘Well, let me say that it should be as anonymous as possible’ (O’Hagan 2017: 329). Although it is likely that Boulez was thinking of the French anonyme in the sense of ‘impersonal’ rather than the exact transliteration of the word, his words fail to address the notational challenges posed by the score when one attempts an interpretation of the piece. The strict application of serial technique to all the musical parameters, with comparatively restricted creative intervention by the composer, results in a series of conundrums for the performer. Even assuming that it is possible to apply twelve distinct dynamic gradations consistently throughout the piece, the operation of serial processes results in a series of notational contradictions. Thus, the extreme dynamic ppp appears throughout one section (bb. 86–97) with the value of a semiquaver and articulated by means of an accent and staccato dot. Whilst it might well be possible to observe the duration and dynamic level for each note, it is virtually impossible to realise these elements in combination with the articulation as marked: because of the wide difference in register between the various pitches, a note in the low bass register will inevitably have much greater resonance than one in the upper treble. The problems with a literal interpretation are multiplied when one considers the ensemble aspects of the piece: at bar 94 in the same passage, the ppp bass A♮ in Piano II coincides with a forte bass F♮ in Piano I. Clearly, for both pitches to be audible, some adjustments will need to be made in the interests of balance. A striking characteristic of the piece, despite its mechanistic elements, is the extent to which the two pianos engage in dialogue, with numerous instances of repetition of pitches and echo effects, especially in the central Lent section. The constant interplay of tritones between the two instruments is an invitation to engage spontaneously in performance with these spatial effects – and notwithstanding the exigencies of notational exactitude, the precise timing and dynamic level of these exchanges is likely to vary in different acoustics and according to the resonating characteristics of the instruments available. An eminently practical musician himself, Boulez as performer was certainly aware of such variables, evidenced by his own performances of Structures, notable for their fidelity to the spirit of the music, if not always for their textual exactness. Just two months prior to the premiere of Structure Ia, Boulez received a visit from Karlheinz Stockhausen, the beginning of a friendship which endured throughout the coming decade, despite an increasing divergence
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of artistic aims. The first and fourth pieces of Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke I–IV were written in the aftermath of this visit and, in them, he takes rhythmic proportions to a new level of complexity. These instrumental works of the post-war decade are inextricably linked with the early development of electronic music, with its possibilities for precise measurement of each of the musical components. Unfortunately, the transfer of such precision to the field of instrumental writing can lead to intractable performance problems. No less a figure than Boulez himself expressed reservations about the practicality of such rhythmic complexity – a comment perhaps influenced by the necessity for a revised version of the vertiginously complex rhythms of the second piece of his Structures (Ib) prior to its first performance. By the following year, Stockhausen’s rigorous approach was beginning to shift as he gained experience in the practicalities of sound projection: It is more dependable for example to indicate p or f even for electronic sounds, than 15 and 45 db, because the latter are unbelievably relative and depend on the manufacture of the individual tape machine, on the size of the room, how full the auditorium is, the position of the loudspeakers, the fluctuations in current in the wires, etc, etc. (Letter to Goeyvaerts dated 10 May 1953, Misch and Delaere 2017: 323)
This heightened awareness of the practicalities of sound production is apparent in the next group of instrumental works, beginning with the six piano pieces, Klavierstücke V–X, started in 1954 but not finally completed until 1961. Despite the extended timescale of composition and their varied character, all the pieces were originally generated from a single series, with the various musical parameters derived from it. Whilst the detailed markings of dynamics and attack remain formidably demanding for the performer, the complexity of rhythmic proportions found in the first set of piano works has been considerably reduced. Although the absence of bar lines (except in Klavierstück IX) is discouraging at first sight, in some of the pieces in the cycle the rhythms can be grouped into quaver units for the purpose of learning, and a regular pulse felt throughout – especially so in numbers V and VIII. A notational innovation in Klavierstück VI is the addition of a scale of graduations of tempo notated above each system of the score, replacing the notational rigours of Klavierstücke I and IV with a more practical approach to the minute adjustments of tempo which occur spontaneously in every performance. In the case of Klavierstück X, the procedure is taken a stage further with the use of ascending and descending beams as a means of indicating flexibility of tempo. The fundamental
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Schoenbergian principles of dodecaphonic ordering of the series was lost – in effect, a return to free atonality, epitomised by the freedom of the writing in the second piece of the second book of Structures (1961). This crisis of serialism occurred just a few years after the indeterminate compositions of John Cage and his followers began to receive serious attention in European musical circles – the invitations to Donaueschingen in 1954 and Darmstadt in 1958 being landmark occasions in the gradual integration of Cage’s innovations into the European musical mainstream. Whilst indeterminacy as a compositional philosophy is on one level at the opposite pole from multiple serialism, each composer would react in his own characteristic way to this encounter. Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI, apparently conceived in 1956, but not completed until the following year, represents his embrace of the challenge, with the published score consisting of a random ordering of the nineteen groups – although the evidence from the sketches suggests that some of the groups were conceived in a numerical sequence. Details of tempo, attacks, and dynamic levels are indicated at the end of each group and are applied to the next group, likewise chosen at random. The practicalities of realising this in performance are considerable, and a strategy which involves a pre-performance shuffling of the groups both preserves the concept of random ordering and allows precious preparation time for the adjustments to the various musical parameters, as dictated by the sequence of groups. Boulez’s more cautious response in the Third Sonata (1957–63) introduced the principle of performer choice – ‘plugging the performer back into the creative circuit’, as he put it (Boulez 1991j: 37) – whilst maintaining a considerable degree of control over the formal parameters. A surprising feature of the two published movements of this work is that, far from the introduction of some flexibility of structure being paralleled by a relaxation of serial principles, the techniques are applied with as much rigour as in the early works, with the central movement ‘Constellation’ involving all fortyeight forms of the series. Even the use of the sustaining pedal is subject to serial principles, with three methods of attack identified and rotated – sustained, staccato, and one producing harmonics, each of which may in turn be modified by pedal. The first generation of performers who worked with Boulez noted his emphasis on these effects of resonance rather than any commentary on the issue of performer choice (personal communication with Leonard Stein and Charles Rosen). It may be observed here that Boulez’s fanatically precise notation has to be interpreted in spirit rather than strictly according to the letter: needless to say, individual pianos differ considerably in the play of the sustaining pedal, and the effects of resonance
Towards an Authentic Interpretation of Serial Music
are subject to such variables as quality of piano and acoustic properties of the venue – bearing in mind that the acoustics themselves can be disconcertingly altered by the presence of an audience. As always, a degree of practical adjustment in performance is perfectly reasonable, especially within the ‘Points’ sections of ‘Constellation’, where the resonances of individual harmonics can be lost without some discreet adjustment. More problematic is the introduction of a degree of performer choice in the ordering of the sections, all of which must nonetheless be played. This clearly presented Boulez himself with challenges as a performer – not dissimilar in practical terms to those of Klavierstück XI – and in fact the three privately available recordings of Boulez himself playing ‘Constellation’ maintain the same ordering of sections in each case, paralleling David Tudor’s practice of using an identical realisation of Cage’s score from performance to performance. Even more problematic is the choice available to the performer in the other published movement, ‘Trope’. Here, Boulez varied the ordering of the four sections in his recorded performances but played all of the optional passages in the two sections ‘Parenthèse’ and ‘Commentaire’. As I have shown elsewhere, the logic of this lies in the highly sophisticated use of related series to act as inserted commentaries throughout these two sections (O’Hagan 2017: 211–15). It could thus be argued that whilst an authentic performance could involve an omission of some (or even all) of the parenthetical sections in accordance with the composer’s instructions, an awareness of the richness of the compositional process would inhibit one from doing so. Ultimately then, it is the performer’s decision, but a decision hopefully based on an informed choice, bearing in mind the role of the commentaries within the framework of the overall structure. The novel published format of these and some other works of this period disguises the fact that the same interpretive principles apply to them as to the other music of the post-war era: that it is the interpreter’s role to choose between the available options in order to present the most convincing interpretation of the composer’s intentions, whilst remaining mindful of the paradox that one route to greater interpretive freedom lies in an enhanced understanding of the complexities of the compositional process. The frame of this discussion is a mere forty years or so, encompassing the ‘classical’ phase of dodecaphonic technique. Yet within that limited period, the stylistic range is enormous, and the challenge, as always, remains that of interpreting the intentions of the composer with fresh insight within the context of a performing tradition. That interpretations of the same work can vary so much not only between individuals, but from
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performance to performance by the same individual, is a reflection not only of the elusiveness of the pursuit of an authentic interpretation, but a continuing affirmation of the multifaceted nature of a work of art, and its constant capacity for self-renewal as the performer aspires to an everdeepening understanding of its musical essence. As Boulez expressed it: ‘The great works, happily, never cease to reimburse the inviolable darkness of their perfection’ (Boulez 1991d: 145).
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Metamorphoses of the Serial (and the ‘Post-Serial’ Question) charles wilson
Back in the 1980s, Carl Dahlhaus wrote of the ‘post-serial’ as a ‘Verlegenheitsvokabel’ – a stopgap, a makeshift term (Dahlhaus 2007: 517). Four decades on, and roughly six since its probable coinage, it arguably still is. As Charles Jencks has noted, categories prefaced by a ‘post-’ tend to have in common ‘the liberating potential of their prefix, the desire to go beyond what were perceived as constricting dogmas’ (Jencks 1987: 12). Yet in this case one might reasonably ask ‘liberation from what?’, in that the stem word seems to pose as many problems as the prefix. A durable definition of the post-serial, in other words, would surely require a more stable notion of serialism itself than the current (lack of) critical consensus allows, the intervening half-century of composition and scholarship having, if anything, complicated rather than clarified the picture. The purpose of this chapter is therefore less to legislate on the question of the post-serial than to explore the expanded field of composition that caused it to arise – those protean metamorphoses of the serial over the twentieth century’s final decades that went beyond the technical to embrace a renewed understanding of aesthetics and of serialism’s (albeit infrequently debated) ramifications for style. Verlegenheit is also a word for ‘embarrassment’, and the use of the terminological fig leaf of the post-serial seemed allied to the embarrassment of two parties in particular. First, scholars, unsure not only of what the ‘serial’ now signified but also of which works fitted that definition, stubbornly as many of them resisted analysis. So many scores were not demonstrably serial, yet at the same time not demonstrably not serial either. Second, there was reticence on the part of composers, whose own ‘embarrassment’ reacted seemingly to charges – from both conservatively minded critics and intellectual fellow-travellers such as Theodor Adorno (Adorno 2002) – of a myopic over-preoccupation with technique. Even those inclined to offer technical accounts of their music frequently did so in ways that threw scholars off the scent. A point of reference for both Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez was the ‘burrow’ of Franz Kafka’s eponymous tale, a metaphor for not only the impenetrable construction of the work itself but also the composer’s workshop as a secret hideaway, whose inhabitant alone possesses ‘minute knowledge of all the paths and
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directions’ (Kafka 2017: 184; cf. Berio 2013a: 237; Boulez 1986c: 145–6). Composers thus distanced themselves from the appearance of excessive formalism, which left them free to pass their own judgement on constructivist excesses, in language occasionally redolent of serialism’s more reactionary detractors. Boulez mocked the ‘maniacal inanity’ (Boulez 1991b: 16) of his own early forays into multi-parametric serialism and often spoke in later life of serialism in the past tense, despite his music’s ongoing dependence on serial routines. Berio, for his part, asked why, since composers seemed willing to serialise anything, they chose notes and not ‘eggs, coat buttons, a trip to Venice, horoscopes or Coca-Cola bottles’ (Faure 1962: 136). Read in their fuller context, these statements stop short of a wholesale disavowal of serial construction. Still, such scathing polemics led some to grasp the wrong end of the stick, leaping to the conclusion that the composers concerned had jettisoned such procedures entirely. Lacking the means to confirm or falsify their assumptions, more and more commentators prematurely closed the chapter on serialism altogether. One such figure in the anglophone sphere was Reginald Smith Brindle. His book The New Music recounted how, after ‘Integral Serialism’ had reached ‘a peak of rationalization in the Fifties’, ‘liberalizing processes set in’, giving rise to what he termed ‘free twelve-tone music’, in which ‘the series is abandoned and note orders are completely free’ (Smith Brindle 1975: 53). Indeed, he viewed this phenomenon as ‘a logical continuation of the “free atonalism” that evolved in the years prior to the First World War’, such that the process went full circle: from ‘free atonalism . . . around 1910’, to twelve-note serialism in 1923, to post-war integral serialism and then back to revived ‘aspects of the early “free atonalism”’. Serialism had therefore ‘come and gone’ – this, in his view, by around 1960 – albeit ‘leaving decisive and lasting traces of its sojourn’ (Smith Brindle 1975: 53). Over recent decades, however, manuscripts of post-Second World War composers, made available in such archives as the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, have revealed how exaggerated such rumours of serialism’s demise mostly were. While the uses to which twelve-note series were put had radically changed, they still lurked in the background of works by composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, and Berio through the 1960s and beyond. And if these rows seldom manifested themselves as linear unfoldings on the music’s surface, such had already been the case in many works of the 1950s, which saw series either subjected to such radical permutation as to make them unrecognisable or else supplanted by ‘secondary structures’ derived from them. The series, to use a locution Boulez
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borrowed from Henri Michaux, had become both ‘centre and absence’ (see Boulez 1986b). At the same time, it was not just composers’ ‘freedom’ from serial notions after 1960 that tended to be overstated. Exaggerated too was the ‘strictness’ with which composers were said to have worked prior to that date. Notions of the straitjacketed rigidity of ‘integral serialism’ or ‘total serialism’ are ubiquitous, but even those works regularly hauled out to demonstrate extreme degrees of ‘automatism’, principally Karel Goeyvaerts’s Sonata for Two Pianos (1950–1) and Boulez’s Structure Ia (1951), contain elements that elude that organisation, namely the note order within the seven-note groupings in the Goeyvaerts and the pitch register and polyphonic density of the series forms in the Boulez (see Piencikowski 1997; Decroupet 2003b). Given that historians have struggled to adduce further examples of ‘total organisation’, it would appear that Smith Brindle’s ‘peak of rationalization’ had been, for all that, barely a molehill. The idea that the serial as a category might be more flexible and capacious than was previously thought could appear to render any notion of the ‘post-serial’ redundant. This was certainly the view of Stockhausen, for whom talk of ‘a “post-serial” phase’ meant ‘simply that the music of recent years sounds different from in the fifties, and since [writers on music] have no understanding of the music of the fifties, other than that it was “serial music”, so today’s music must therefore be “post-serial”. Is that not terribly banal?’ (Stockhausen 1978a: 550). Stockhausen’s contention that ‘post-serial’ was, for some, a mere chronological marker – the ‘serial’ 1950s, the ‘post-serial’ 1960s – was not without justification (witness the title given to the Dahlhaus text, ‘The Post-Serial Decade’, quoted at the start of this chapter). For others, meanwhile, it was more of a generational notion, the idea of a first wave of serialists (figures active in the early 1950s, such as Boulez, Nono, Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, and Bruno Maderna) succeeded by a later, ‘post-serial’ generation (Sylvano Bussotti, Franco Evangelisti, Mauricio Kagel, and György Ligeti) – though ‘later’ in terms less of the age of the composers (Ligeti and Evangelisti were senior to Stockhausen) than of their belated entry into serial circles. Still, Stockhausen’s problem with the post-serial was more that it took insufficient account of the transformations wrought within serialism itself. Those transformations had been technical, concerned with compositional material and bound up with both the quantitative and the qualitative aspects of sound. But they had been aesthetic too, marking a shift from ‘a hierarchical thinking in all areas of music’ to ‘an extended serial thinking’ that would
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preserve ‘an equality of all the elements in a composition and yet respect the law of natural distinctions’ (Stockhausen 1978a: 550). And to those considerations of technique and aesthetic one could perhaps add a third, invoking a category that was often taboo in serial circles, namely style. If serialism is a technique, in other words, how should it be defined? Should its object be a note row, or might it use any permutable set or scale of values – and, indeed, an independent scale of values for each ‘parameter’ or dimension of sound? And if that scale no longer involved discrete quanta, might it be conceived less as a scale and more as a continuum? If, at the same time, serialism is regarded as an aesthetic, is it an aesthetic of control or, rather, of unpredictability and openness? Does it involve a narrow and exclusive kind of material that seeks to sever connections with past music or a broad, inclusive aesthetic that can potentially embrace any material whatsoever? Serialism has generally been considered not to constitute a style in itself but rather to be capable of accommodating different stylistic tendencies. Questions of style have therefore found themselves marginalised in most discussions of serial music. But did serial music of the 1950s create, in spite of itself, a set of stylistic idiosyncrasies? And might such stylistic features then find themselves deployed in the absence of any rigorous technique? All these questions retain their relevance to the various metamorphoses that serialism underwent between the late 1950s and the early 1980s, and further beyond. While the music discussed in this chapter may count as ‘serial’ to some but already ‘post-serial’ to others, much of it involves at some level the prising apart of serialism’s technical, aesthetic, and ‘stylistic’ dimensions – dimensions that had at least appeared congruent at the start of the 1950s, however much they were already beginning to drift apart.
Generalising the Serial While designations such as ‘integral serialism’, ‘multiple serialism’, and ‘total serialism’ have held sway in the anglophone literature, ‘generalised serialism’ was the term favoured by such figures as Boulez and Pousseur. For them, the nomenclature was not incidental. Just as Newtonian mechanics, broadly speaking, sits as a special case within the post-Einstein universe, so Schoenberg’s twelve-note technique came to be seen, even by as orthodox a Schoenbergian as René Leibowitz, as a subspecies – a ‘special case’ – within a wider field of generalised possibilities (Leibowitz 1947: 127). Boulez, in his notorious ‘anti-obituary’ to Schoenberg, wrote of how
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one might ‘generalize the serial principle to the four constituents of sound: pitch, duration, dynamics/attack and timbre’ (Boulez 1991f: 214). But this was to be no mechanical transfer of the twelve-note principle onto other dimensions. Rather, every assumption inherited from the Second Viennese School would now come in for systematic interrogation. First of all, why twelve tones? By the time Boulez wrote that ‘serial thinking can at last escape the number twelve’ (Boulez 1991g: 177), others had already been questioning the necessity or sufficiency of a continuous circulation of all twelve notes, among them Milton Babbitt with his notion of ‘combinatoriality’ and Pousseur in his observations on Webern’s ‘organic chromaticism’. Babbitt saw as a necessary condition of aggregate formation in Schoenberg not just the use of a single ‘set’ or row but rather the use of ‘areas’ consisting of (usually four) sets with combinatorial, and hence aggregate-completing, properties (see Babbitt 1987b: 52). By contrast, Pousseur, observing how the polyphonic treatment of note rows frequently involves the ‘premature’ repetition of pitch classes, suggested that it was chromatic intervallic relationships within the texture (and especially their ability to divert attention from octave relationships) that would ensure the harmonic integrity of the resulting texture, regardless of the completeness of the aggregate (see Pousseur 1955). Indeed, for Babbitt the hexachord was just as critical to the system’s potentialities as the twelve-note ‘set’ itself. And just as Schoenberg himself had experimented back in the 1920s with ‘tones of a motive’ of varying lengths, so composers’ scales of values came to vary widely, from as few as four (the first of Stravinsky’s Shakespeare Songs, 1954) or seven (Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, 1955–6) to as many as thirteen (Berio’s Nones, 1954, and Stockhausen’s Mantra, 1970). Second, why twelve tones – in other words, giving priority to pitch? According to Boulez, Schoenberg’s technique had been ‘one-sided’ in neglecting rhythm, dynamics, and mode of attack (Boulez 1991f: 213). And before long, the possibility arose of conceiving of still further ‘parameters’, individual dimensions of sound that could be isolated and classified for the purposes of serial manipulation. But one should not therefore assume, as many textbook accounts do, that ‘integral serialism’ necessarily involved a systematic organisation of each and every parameter, let alone the simple extrapolation onto other parameters of a twelve-element ordering unfolded in a linear, note-by-note fashion. While Structure Ia, for instance, has sets of twelve values for each of the four parameters, only those for pitch and duration unfold in such a way: those for dynamics and mode of attack are applied instead to entire twelve-note statements (of pitch–duration).
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But a third question – equally crucial from the perspective of the ontology of the series – concerned the operations to which a series could be subjected and yet still retain its essential identity. Schoenberg had memorably compared the twelve-note row to a hat, equally recognisable from above or below or from left or right (Erwin Stein, in Busch 1985: 7). Its ‘shape’ (or at least its potential for such shape when actualised in register) depended on what Babbitt called the ‘interval-preserving operations’ (Babbitt 1987b: 22) – the ‘canonical’ Schoenbergian transformations of transposition, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion – with rows equivalent under those operations deemed to be members of the same ‘row class’ (Morris 1987: 114). Boulez’s handling of the pitch-class series in Structure Ia was ‘interval-preserving’ in this way, despite the complex polyphonic interweaving of series forms. But traceable in his sketches from 1952 (and anticipating its use in the ‘Bourreaux de solitude’ cycle of Le Marteau sans maître, 1952–5) is a more radical technique, which Stockhausen referred to as ‘modulo permutation’ or ‘zweites Permutation’ (see Decroupet 1997: 334) and made use of himself, including at the opening of Kontra-Punkte (1952–3) (Mosch 1997). This process involved ‘translating’ pitch-class intervals into order-number intervals and applying these order displacements individually to each note of the row. Both Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono had been employing similar permutational procedures as early as 1951 but using numerical displacement factors other than those of pitch-class interval (such as the Fibonacci number sequences used by Nono in Canti per 13, 1954–5) (see Borio 2004: 102– 3). These procedures served to ‘scatter’ the original row, sundering its noteto-note intervallic relationships. What resulted was not just multiple rows of different ‘row classes’ but rows that were (again to use set-theoretic terminology) partially ordered (see Lewin 1976), in that the individualised ‘moves’ of pitch classes could leave certain order positions empty and others occupied by more than one note – a row, in other words, of ‘variable density’ incorporating dyads, trichords, and (especially after any further iteration of the process) potentially larger sets. In a ‘row’ that is the product of modulo permutation, therefore, the singleton pitch classes will appear in a given order, but where a position contains more than one note, those pitch classes can occur in any order. Neither partial ordering itself (evident, for instance, in Schoenberg’s treatment of the trichords of the row as freely ordered groupings in Ode to Napoleon op. 41) nor transformations outside the Schoenbergian ‘canon’ of row-class operations were especially new. Notable especially are the permutational procedures used by Alban Berg in his opera Lulu (1929–35), which left their mark on a composer like Hans
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Werner Henze (see Kovács 1997c: 41), and Eimert’s Quartverwandlung (or its inversion, the Quintverwandlung), which maps the chromatic scale (or a permutation thereof) onto the cycle of fourths or fifths (or a permutation thereof) (see Eimert 1950: 28–31), an operation later formalised as M/MI by Robert Morris (Morris 1987: 114). But the procedures now adopted by Boulez, Nono, and Stockhausen, which often involved the continuous application of further order displacements throughout the work, posed still more radical questions concerning the ontology of the series itself and, as such, seemed calculated less towards new conceptions of order than towards controlled disorder. While some techniques focused on those radically disruptive forms of linear ordering, others put into question the dimension of that ordering. The ‘variable density’ row already blurred the distinction between horizontal and vertical dimensions, and now composers started to ask why a row should be ordered primarily in time rather than, for instance, in register. This strategy was discussed by Boulez in the essay ‘ . . . Near and Far’ (Boulez 1991d: 154) and actualised in the third cycle of Le Marteau, though it was clear that such a ‘vertical’ ordering need in principle neither be serial in nature nor preclude temporal (horizontal) ordering, in terms of the entry points of pitches within the field. Indeed vertical dispositions of the twelve-note aggregate came to preoccupy composers whose music was not generally considered serial. Elliott Carter professed (Bernard 1990: 201) to having created certain of his trademark all-interval twelve-note chords by vertically upending note rows from a published inventory of all-interval series (Bauer-Mengelberg and Ferentz 1965). The Polish composer Witold Lutosławski meanwhile produced his own catalogue of aggregategenerating interval patterns (see Homma 2001), albeit inclined towards limited-interval rather than all-interval sequences (for instance, the alternating semitones and tritones of Musique funèbre, 1958). Though linear serial organisation as such remained an exception in his music, his twelvenote chords often resemble in their intervallic construction the fixedregister interval fields found in serial works of the period. But probably the most radical moves of the 1950s involved seeing the row no longer as an ‘ordering’ at all but rather as a reservoir of possibilities. For Boulez, the series was to be viewed as ‘not an order of events, but a hierarchy’ (Boulez 1991d: 149–50). Such hierarchical thinking might entail using the series ‘to formulate objects which, in their turn, can be the basis of serial generation’ (Boulez 1971: 104). These ‘objects’ might be, for instance, the blocs sonores (‘sound blocks’, again unordered pitch-class sets) produced from the partitioning of the twelve-note row into note
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groups of different sizes (in the first cycle of Le Marteau permutable partitions of two, four, two, one, and three notes) which are then subject to ‘multiplication’ by transposing the notes of one ‘block’ onto another and combining the result. Not only can the individual notes of the resulting sets be disposed in a variety of ways – as lines, chords, or a hybrid of the two – but paths from one set to the next can take a variety of forms. The sets generated by multiplication therefore build on the intervallic characteristics of the original series, even if the latter itself can rarely be traced as a linear succession. While Boulez’s ‘multiplication’ procedures may have been generalised from such phenomena as the transpositional combination of trichordal row-segments in Webern’s Second Cantata (1941–3), Stockhausen found a precedent in the same composer’s Concerto op. 24 (1931–4) for his notion of ‘group composition’ (see Stockhausen 1963c and 1963g). But whereas Boulez’s blocs sonores were not always articulated as discrete entities on the music’s surface, Stockhausen’s groups had a more striking profile phenomenologically, unified as they often were by common ‘group characteristics’, such as a single timbre, dynamic, or type of articulation. Whereas much post-war serial music had tended to feature constant contrasts in the various parameters, each note manifesting itself as an isolated entity (hence the term punktuelle Musik, ‘point music’), group characteristics were achieved by fixing one or more of the parameters for a longer span of time, applying a single quantum, for instance a dynamic value, not to a single note but to a composite element, a group of notes. As Stockhausen soon turned his attention from the ‘group’, the perceptible Gestalt, to the ‘mass’ – denser, swarm-like complexes in which it was impossible to make out individual notes and which lent themselves, rather, to characterisation in global, statistical terms – the domain over which a single parameter could prevail was considerably enlarged. Indeed the overlapping individual sections of Stockhausen’s Gruppen of 1955–7 (whose title refers more overtly to its three spatially separated orchestra groups) resemble masses more than groups, and their genesis illustrates another way of treating the series as a global formal determinant. Within the work’s fundamental scheme (derived from twelve successive fixedregister row forms), not only is each pitch frequency translated into a unit pulse to determine the tempos of the groups (and the frequency ratios used to determine their relative duration), but the pitch intervals of the sequence (read in retrograde) provide a notional bandwidth for successive groups, giving each a distinctive registral profile (see Misch 1998). Pousseur’s Quintette à la mémoire d’Anton Webern (1955) likewise
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experiments with the interval as ‘bandwidth’, the successive intervals of the row (borrowed from Webern’s op. 22) ‘filled in’ to generate chromatic strings of varying lengths (see Decroupet 1997: 347–54). But since these are treated not as chromatic clusters but as pitch classes freely distributed in register, the effect is heard in terms not of registral ambitus but rather of fluctuating textural density. In both works, nonetheless, the ontological identity of the series, as conceived by Schoenberg in terms of an ordered succession of pitch-class intervals, was yet again effaced by new, and here essentially statistical, considerations.
The Indeterminate Moment This new orientation towards the statistical in Stockhausen’s music focuses one of the central issues in post-war metamorphoses of the serial: the role of aleator(ic)ism or indeterminacy. For decades, as M. J. Grant points out, the historiographical norm was to present indeterminacy as the antithesis of serialism, and composers as having supposedly performed ‘a U-turn by employing aleatoric methods from the mid-1950s’, prompted by encounters with the New York School and, in particular, John Cage’s 1958 visit to the Darmstadt New Music Courses (Grant 2001: 131). But, as both Grant and Martin Iddon have demonstrated (Iddon 2013), such a version of events slights both chronology and significant commonalities of aesthetic. Both ‘aleatory’ (aléatoire, aleatorisch) and ‘indeterminate’ (indeterminé, unbestimmt) had entered the theoretical vocabulary of European music much earlier in the decade. Boulez and Cage had corresponded intensively from mid-1949 until the end of 1951, when Boulez declared himself ‘not happy with . . . the method of absolute chance (by tossing the coins)’ (Nattiez 2002: 193). Cage’s use of chance procedures to produce a score in fixed notation, the phenomenon Christian Wolff called ‘indeterminacy in respect to composition’ (Cline 2019: 84), was slow to find imitators in Europe, whereas scores that left key decisions to the performer(s) – yet whose components could be, and often were, serially composed – started to emerge in the late 1950s. Perhaps the key aesthetic difference came down to Cage’s stated desire for a music ‘free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the literature and traditions of art’ (Cage 1961: 59). Freedom from memory and the past was one thing but freedom from ‘taste’ – an indifference to the sounding result – was, for some, a step too far. Even in Cage’s music during this period, the role of taste has arguably been underplayed, as the composer’s own auto-critique of his Music of
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Changes (1951) and Music for Piano (1952–6) testifies (Pritchett 1989: 256). Boulez, for his part, was clearly aware that his highly ramified serial processes could be as unpredictable in their consequences as chance operations – he acknowledged the presence of ‘the unknown’ in the ‘interpolations and interferences of different series’ (Nattiez 2002: 193) – but the deployment of their resultants in terms of register, Gestalt, and temporal succession was still informed by taste and judgement. All music inevitably entails a certain margin of indeterminacy, and the serial experiences of the 1950s if anything intensified this awareness. As composers sought to quantify such elements as dynamics and mode of attack, and to subject rhythmic proportions to the minutest serial calculations, approximation on the part of human performers became inevitable, and the resulting indeterminacies of speed, duration, and coordination started to be openly embraced. Stockhausen’s Zeitmaße (1955–6) for wind quintet, as its title suggests, is concerned with tempos and their relativity. As in Gruppen, metronome speeds (at times different in each instrument) are precisely calculated, but the transitions between them (instructions to slow down and speed up) are left to the judgement and physical capabilities of the performers – their ability to play, for instance, at maximum speed or in a single breath. In the piano works of both Stockhausen and Boulez, the frequent use of agglomerations of grace notes (often resulting from the grafting of secondary serial structures onto primary ones) united with increasing considerations of resonance (the indeterminacy of a sound’s decay) to nurture the phenomenon that Boulez termed temps lisse (‘smooth time’, as opposed to temps strié, ‘striated time’), mostly captured in unmetered and/or proportional notation and coordinated by cues from conductor or fellow performers (Boulez 1971: 93–94; see also Goldman 2011: 12–13). Even in the domain of electronics, where precise quantification was sought down to the microstructure of individual sounds, such absolute determinacy had proved an impossibly elusive goal. Indeterminacy therefore began to enter all manner of discourses surrounding the compositional process. Stockhausen’s ‘mass’ textures in Gruppen and Carré (1959–60) – textures whose individual notes (let alone their ordering) were imperceptible – not only made unavoidable the language of ‘fuzziness’ and approximation (terms such as ‘on average [durchschnittlich], predominantly [vorwiegend] . . . approximately [annährend]’) but would also, Stockhausen asserted, ‘allow us to speak of statistical form’ (Stockhausen 1963f: 77). In producing such dense textures, should composers use serial procedures (much as their consequences might be inaudible), should they resort (as would Iannis Xenakis) to probabilistic or statistical calculation, or should
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they leave the ordering to some degree to the performers’ discretion? That last possibility stimulated numerous manifestations of ‘limited aleatoricism’ in both serial and non-serial works. Berio, in the final section of Tempi concertati (1958) and the third movement of Circles (1960), experimented with varied notations in the context of proportional spacing. These included boxed configurations in which the notes can be ordered at will, as well as the soon-to-be-ubiquitous ‘wavy line’, indicating ad libitum repetition. That latter notational device is also found in the rhythmically free sections of Lutosławski’s works of the 1960s onwards, in which the note order and rhythmic proportions of individual lines are specified but the coordination between them not. The contrast in Lutosławski’s works between ad libitum and strictly metered a battuta sections creates, arguably, another form of Boulez’s opposition between ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ time. In Stockhausen’s first foray into open form in his Klavierstück XI (1956), the nineteen freely orderable units are fully, and indeed serially, composed out. Still, Stockhausen drew on his studio experiences, making the comparison with a sound or noise in which, as with instrumental ‘mass’ textures, ‘certain partials, components, are behaving statistically. . . . If I make a whole piece similar to the ways in which this sound is organized, then naturally the individual components of this piece could also be exchanged, permutated, without changing the basic quality’ (Cott 1974: 70). Boulez likewise used the studio analogy of ‘formants’ to characterise the five main components of his Third Piano Sonata (1955–7/1963), which he described as a ‘work in progress’ in the manner of James Joyce and which was to remain unfinished. Whereas in Klavierstück XI a player makes an instantaneous choice from the materials at hand, Boulez expected his performer to plan a route through the labyrinth (again, the reference to Kafka’s ‘Burrow’) (Boulez 1986c: 148, 145). The essential scheme involved a central retrogradable formant (‘Constellation’) around which four others revolved; in the event, only the retrograde version (‘Constellation-Miroir’) was formally released for performance along with one other formant, ‘Trope’. The formants have further mobile elements: in the case of ‘Trope’ four subsections, of which two can be exchanged and the whole sequence performed in any circular permutation (a possibility facilitated by the ring-binding of the score). (The title of one of them, ‘Parenthèse’, refers literally to bracketed-off sections that can be either played or omitted.) Spoken of in this way, the concept of formal mobility starts to seem less to do with ‘chance’ per se than ‘as a radicalisation of the serial principles of permutation and rotation’ (Borio 1993: 62), transplanted from the local to the global level. But it was also a manifestation of the inherently open-ended
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nature of serial thought – ‘a universe in continuous expansion’, to quote Boulez’s Fasquelle encyclopedia entry on the ‘series’ (Boulez 1991c: 236) – which simply threw up more possibilities than could ever be contained within a single version of a single work. If composers like Boulez and Berio made progressively less use of indeterminate notation, increasingly aware of its impracticalities in performance, both shifted their preoccupation with openness to a different level. For Boulez, it went from the level of the work to his output as a whole: the alternative possibilities harboured within a conception like that of the Third Sonata (and there left to performer choice) could also be explored either in consecutive versions of the same work (again the Joycean work in progress) or else in material carried over from one work to the next. For Berio, meanwhile, ‘openness’ in the definition articulated by his friend and collaborator Umberto Eco (Eco 1989) remained an ideal for every work, albeit now in the sense less of a work ‘in movement’ than of one that permits a multi-perspectival reading and, in particular, interpellates the listener in an act of co-creation, not of the sounding reality as such but of its meanings and relationships. While many composers’ further moves into indeterminacy and graphic notation eventually parted company with anything resembling serialism, with others serial preoccupations persisted – if, often, at little beyond surface level. Aldo Clementi’s Informel 3 (1963), while deriving all its pitch content from rows of twelve notes (albeit at times ‘defective’ series, i.e. incorporating pitch-class duplications), functions more in the nature of a graphic score. Its visual resemblance to an ‘all-over’ abstract expressionist painting has its sonic correlate in what Richard Toop called its ‘opaque but constantly shifting surface’, the intermittent gaps in its dense aggregates determined by amoeba or lozenge shapes drawn on its grid-like pages (Toop 2004: 459; see also Borio 1993: 128–33). At the same time other forms of indeterminacy show the survival of parameter-based thinking, even in the absence of rows or sets of proportions. This was true of a work such as Dieter Schnebel’s Glossolalie (1960) for voices and instruments, whose materials, rather than defining the piece’s events, provide a ‘kit’ that specifies individual qualitative characteristics for the various ‘parameters’ (by no means restricted to the standard ones), which are then combined into events by the performers themselves (see Zagorski 2009; Borio 1993: 109–18). It was the case too for many of the process works of Stockhausen – Prozession (1967) and Kurzwellen (1968), for instance – where the plus, minus, and equal signs notated in the score reflect the modification of parameters such as pitch, dynamic, and duration, even though the works’ sound materials are themselves indeterminate.
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Beyond the Serial? Discussions about when the term ‘serial’ might start to lose its meaning altogether intensified around 1960. In 1959, Heinz-Klaus Metzger cast doubt on its appropriateness to works based on ‘the concept of groups’ (Metzger 1961: 25). A year later, György Ligeti, in his article ‘Compositional Tendencies Today’, suggested that the conception had ‘undergone such far-reaching changes, and the method itself been set in flux to such an extent that . . . one can scarcely still speak of serial composition in the original sense of the word’ (Ligeti 2007b: 112). Ligeti was not yet attaching to this ‘new kind of music’ the label ‘post-serial’ – he would later do so (Ligeti 1983: 137) – but he nonetheless saw it as a phenomenon that ‘embodies both the serial conception and its disintegration and therefore stands beyond the serial [jenseits des Seriellen]’ (Ligeti 2007b: 116). ‘Compositional Tendencies Today’ is perhaps more fully understood in light of the texts completed either side of it. An earlier article, ‘Metamorphoses of Musical Form’, had taken as its premise ‘the emergence of a shared new sense of musical form’ amongst ‘the various “serial” composers’ (Ligeti 1965: 5 [translation modified]; original reprinted as Ligeti 2007c). Ligeti noted approvingly the way in which ‘group’-oriented serialism had diverted attention from the individual note to the ‘group’ and the ‘mass’ but saw that shift of focus from local ordering to global formal categories as a tacit acknowledgement of the self-negating quality of ever more complex serial determinations at a local level. He was by no means the first to have commented in such terms. Xenakis, in a 1954 article entitled ‘The Crisis of Serial Music’, had likewise remarked on how the polyphonic overlay of serially ordered lines tended towards a form of entropy, ‘an irrational and random dispersal of sounds across the entire extent of the sonic spectrum’ (Xenakis 1955: 3). And in this sense, both Xenakis and Ligeti were simply echoing the self-critiques of Boulez, Pousseur, and, especially, Stockhausen (Stockhausen 1963d: 170–1 and 1961: 79–80). But whereas those composers had seen their own evolving practices as consequential developments of serialism itself, for Ligeti they raised the possibility of abandoning serial technique altogether. Towards the end of ‘Metamorphoses’, he asked: ‘If serial determinations have already been shifted onto more global categories of form . . . why should serial manipulations be used at all? Couldn’t the form, in both its overall trajectory and all its details, be left completely to the unencumbered imagination?’ (Ligeti 2007c: 94–5; Ligeti 1965: 12, translation modified).
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At this juncture, Ligeti appeared to step back from that proposal: ‘such freedom would be false’ and, what is more, ‘a pre-formed network of possibilities and limitations’ allowed one to ‘compose more freely than in total independence’ (Ligeti 2007c: 95; Ligeti 1965: 12, translation modified). A few years later, however, in a 1965 Darmstadt lecture on ‘Form in the New Music’, Ligeti now seemed to embrace it. Once form has been established on a global level, he now suggested, ‘relationships within the compositional process broadly coincide with those that appear in the composed music’. This in turn renders it possible to ‘forgo any ordering or manipulation according to pre-determined directives’, since ‘the primary given is not the compositional process, but the conception of the form in its totality, the imagination of the sounding music. . . . By eliminating any pre-formation, the musical imagination can surrender itself freely to the uncharted and the uncertain’ (Ligeti 2007a: 199). Ligeti’s appeal to the primacy of the conception of form recalls Adorno’s notion, formulated a few years earlier, of a musique informelle, a type of music that ‘has discarded all forms which are external or abstract or which confront it in an inflexible way’ and yet ‘should nevertheless constitute itself in an objectively compelling way, in the musical substance itself, and not in terms of external laws’ (Adorno 1992: 272). But whereas Ligeti trumpeted his confidence in the power of the unfettered imagination to secure ‘the uncharted and the uncertain’ and hence effortlessly ‘conceive of the new’ (Ligeti 2007a: 199), Adorno was more sceptical. According to him, composers faced a ‘double bind’ between on the one hand wilfully ignoring ‘the pattern of [their] own reactions’ and simply ‘labour[ing] away at the material to hand’ – which he saw as a surrender ‘to the philistinism of reified consciousness’ – and, on the other, depending on their ‘own spontaneous reactions’ and ignoring ‘the constraints of the principles of construction’ (Adorno 1992: 278). Indeed, the solutions Ligeti adopted in his own compositions were perhaps not as radically distanced from serial thinking as he would later claim (see Wilson 2004: esp. 9–12). The ‘preformation’ he was proposing to eliminate had neither been jettisoned altogether in his immediately preceding works nor would be in those that followed. The technique he dubbed ‘micropolyphony’, introduced in the second movement of Apparitions (1958–9) and developed extensively in Atmosphères (1961), was a form of canonic imitation dense in both its chromaticism and the closeness of its polyphonic entries. As such, it was comparable, at least in principle, to a Webernian canon and hence to all intents and purposes a serial technique, if anything stricter in its linear succession than much avowedly serial writing of the time. And those microcanonic techniques would continue through works of the 1960s, including the
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Requiem (1963–5) and Lontano (1967), albeit in less pervasively chromatic form. Xenakis, meanwhile, saw his move to stochastic organisation in works such as Pithoprakta (1955–6), its dense sound masses modelled on the statistical motions of gas particles, as a further generalisation of serial organisation, itself ‘a special case of stochastic thinking’ (Xenakis 1965: 36). Crucial here is the question not only of the necessity of serial technique but also of whether that technique – multifarious as it had become – should be seen as an end in itself or rather the means to a fundamental transformation of musical material. Perhaps that renewal of material had already proved so radical and thoroughgoing that the ‘ladder’ that had enabled its attainment could now be kicked away. But to others such a view appeared complacent. If serial technique were to be regarded as dispensable and the imagination allowed simply to fall back onto intuition and habit, the ceaseless renewal of compositional material would then be brought to a standstill. The ‘stylistic’ traits of serial works as developed hitherto then simply become yet more material ‘ready at hand’ for use, or just slavish imitation, by composers, rather like those handed-down historical materials that serialism had purposely set out to elude. Ligeti himself, in the ‘Form’ lecture, had spoken of how ‘an inventory of types’, including ‘irregular leaps up and down in wide intervals . . . unbroken, persistent planes of sound with generally cluster-like internal organisation . . . delicate, bustling percussion activity bathed in vibraphone and bell sounds’ were now ‘so extensively ingrained that they have become as common as an authentic cadence once was’ (Ligeti 2007a: 193). Serialism – or, if one preferred, post-serialism – might thus crystallise into code and into ‘style’, in a way that could be seen as either an inevitability of the historical process or a betrayal of serialism’s motivating, self-regenerating impulse. The latter was predictably the view taken by Adorno, for whom the spectre of epigonism now loomed larger than ever. He had previously noted how the expressionism of the Second Viennese School, once able to deal a genuine shock to its audience, had become ‘tame and impoverished’ at the hands of a younger generation of composers, namely Boulez, Goeyvaerts, and Stockhausen (Adorno 2002: 182). Now the music of that younger generation fell prey to the same risk, in that ‘conventions of expression [had] crystallized even in a language hostile to convention’, creating what he called a ‘seconddegree conformism’: through their expertise in manipulating a limited range of the modernist vocabu lary they become qualified to show that they have mastered the new idiom, and for this very reason they speak it inaccurately. . . . As soon as the recast material relieves the composer of the need to make an effort the very thing that gives music . . .
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substance a stylistic modernism starts to make its appearance, negating the whole thrust of the avant garde manner that it has elevated into the mark of its own style. (Adorno 1999c: 177 9)
From a present-day vantage point, the distance between Ligeti and those who willingly self-identified as serialists now seems less wide than it once did. It has become increasingly apparent that serialism was always about a balance of – or a compromise between – the rational and the empirical, however much it seemed weighted towards the rational side of the equation. Indeed, what Ligeti described in ‘Metamorphoses’ as the musical realisation retroactively modifying the precompositional plan (Ligeti 2007c: 95) was no novelty, since such ‘expedient readjustment’, as Richard Toop called it, had been endemic to post-war serial practice from the start (Toop 1985: 8). More striking in Ligeti’s ‘Form’ lecture than his rhetorical rejection of serialism (Adorno, after all, had proffered ‘a-serial music’ as a possible synonym for musique informelle) is the dramatic shift it signals towards empiricism. Doubtless this new confidence in empirical approaches stemmed in large part from experiences in the electronic studio. In their foreword to the first issue of Die Reihe, Eimert and Stockhausen had noted that the ‘relation to sound has never been as direct as it is today’ (Eimert and Stockhausen, quoted in Grant 2001: 88). The everyday ‘manual labour’ in the studio – cutting, splicing and synchronising tapes, modifying sound envelopes, filtering noise bands, and adjusting speed, dynamics, and resonance – allowed composers, in spite of the cumbersome nature of the technology, to sense a certain immediacy in the manipulation of sound. The way was now open for the tendency that became known variously as ‘texture music’, ‘timbre music’, or ‘sonorism’ – works that not infrequently made sporadic and eclectic use of serial devices but placed their focus rather on the distinctive qualities of texture that had often occurred as the byproducts of serial procedures. Many of these works (some of which, like Lutosławski’s, made use of limited aleatoricism) developed highly sophisticated means of ordering and classifying timbres and textures, frequently drawing on parameter-based oppositions. Krzysztof Penderecki’s was one such system (see Mirka 2001); another was the inventory of ‘Sound Types of the New Music’ assembled by Helmut Lachenmann, a composer by no means unmindful of the potential cul-de-sac of a stylistic modernism (Lachenmann 1970). But perhaps the avant-garde ideal of a complete tabula rasa – a music untainted by stylistic reminiscence – had always been an illusion. Ultimately, as Adorno himself was to put it in the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, ‘the complete negation of style seems to reverse dialectically into style’ (Adorno 1997: 207).
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The ‘Meta-serial’ By the 1960s, serialism as a concept had become increasingly elusive. To Gottfried Michael Koenig, it now signified ‘everything and nothing, and could almost be considered a world view’ (Koenig 2018: 152). Meanwhile to Bruno Maderna what was ‘yesterday a grammatical system, a tool of organisation’ had become a state of mind, ‘a forma mentis’ (Maderna 1965: 28). But for Pousseur, tasked with the ‘Serial Music’ entry for the Harvard Dictionary of Music, the challenge of definition was less easily evaded: General term describing 20th century compositions in which the traditional rules and conventions governing all aspects of music tonality, melody, harmony, rhythm etc. are discarded, to be replaced by various new rules and principles. The most general such principle, which radically distinguishes serial music from traditional tonality, is the distribution of structural importance over many (pos sibly all) elements of musical development, and, as a result, the multiplication of structural characters through their reciprocal ‘relativization’. (Pousseur 1969: 766)
Conspicuously absent from Pousseur’s definition are those references to the twelve notes or to ‘ordering’ which the publication’s mainly anglophone readership would doubtless have expected. And the notion of serialism as a radical break with categories of tradition, however uncontroversial from a European perspective, differed radically from the views of American serialists, who saw themselves, in Babbitt’s words, as ‘the legitimate, if abandoned, children of the Schoenbergian revolution’ (Babbitt 1973–4: 28) and hence (so the implication ran) the true inheritors of the European tonal tradition and its legacy. But what is more, Pousseur’s idea of distributing structural importance across ‘many (possibly all) elements of musical development’ hinted at a yet more ambitious stage in the generalisation of the serial concept, one that would be concerned with the ‘synthesis of elements traditionally considered antithetical’: ‘This new stage in the history of serial music will manifest itself in the increasing overthrow of a number of taboos (for example, prohibition of octaves) that serial composers originally felt obliged to establish. All kinds of material – both traditional and wholly new – will come to be used integrally’ (Pousseur 1969: 769–70). If Pousseur’s dictionary entry reflects more than anything his own current compositional preoccupations, it makes clear nonetheless how far and how fast serial music had travelled in less than two decades. For Stockhausen, Boulez, and others in the 1950s, serialism had been a way
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of guaranteeing materialgerechtes Denken – a conception of music that, by resisting (and insuring against) the temptation to fall back on instinct or spontaneous invention, would be free of reminiscences of past music (see Zagorski 2009: 296–8). But to an increasing number of composers, the lifting of taboos seemed desirable, especially those on consonance and on semantic and historical reference in general. Serialism could then become truly omnivorous, traversing the entire sonic spectrum and offering, in Berio’s words, ‘the chance to control a larger musical terrain’ (Berio 1985: 64). At its most ambitious the vision was of a ‘system of systems’, in which different musics – running the whole gamut from the complex to the simple, from the dissonant to the consonant, and from the unfamiliar and unrecognisable to the familiar and recognisable – could be embraced and reconciled, a view variously expressed in political, ethical, and (in Stockhausen’s case especially) transcendental terms. In this way, as Richard Toop puts it, ‘purism gave way to pluralism’ (Toop 2004: 454), but in ways that preserved key aspects of the serial thought of the previous decade: first, parameter-based thinking; second, the notion of a ‘scale’ of elements subject to permutation; and third, the possibility of reconceiving the ‘scale’ as an unbroken continuum that allowed gradual and scarcely perceptible transitions from one state to another. While text had by no means been excluded from serial music of the early 1950s, it increasingly found itself drawn, in both its phonetic and its semantic aspects, into the domain of serial composition. A work such as Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–6) had been significant not only for bringing a ‘concrete’ element, in the form of a boy’s voice, into the domain of electronically generated sound, but also for its syllabic treatment of the Apocryphal text – an ‘insert’ between Daniel 3:23 and 3:24 – with vowels (as periodic sounds) and consonants (as aperiodic noise elements) placed at opposite ends of the acoustic continuum (see Decroupet and Ungeheuer 1998). Berio, in a working discussion of his tape piece Thema – Omaggio a Joyce (1958–9), based on chapter 11 of Joyce’s Ulysses, talked of seeking a ‘gradual and continuous evolution’ based on the classification of vowel sounds in the text ‘according to a scale of vocal colours – a series in a certain sense – which extends from A to U, including the diphthongs’ (Berio 2013b: 260–1). In Circles, he brought a similar kind of analysis to bear outside the electronic domain, with alliterative processes explored between individual phonemes and instrumental sounds in ways analogous to the pitch-class repetitions and redundancies – themselves a form of alliteration – within the movement’s serial processes (see Neidhöfer 2012).
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Along with the incorporation of text and its associated phonetic materials into the compositional process came that of gesture. Dahlhaus notes the way in which Kagel’s ‘instrumental theatre’, with its aim to ‘regulate and highlight not so much the results of the sound as the actions of the players, can be understood as an extreme form of parameter-based thinking, which now also brought under its control the movements of the instrumentalists and their trajectories in space’ (Dahlhaus 2007: 520). Hence, gestures and actions are now as much ‘composed’ as other elements of the work, whether as autonomous ‘parameters’ in themselves, such as in the ‘main actions’ that are combined with ‘realisation forms’ in the 1962 theatrical version of Kagel’s Antithese (see Mikawa 2014: esp. 211–12), or mapped onto the values of more conventionally ‘musical’ parameters, as with the prayer gestures performed by dancer-mimes in Stockhausen’s Inori (1973–4). For Berio, on the other hand, the gesture was something latent and awaiting activation in the musical material itself – rather like the meaning that Adorno described as ‘history . . . migrated into music’ (Adorno 1999c: 160). The way that instruments can be seen to carry embodied history is especially evident in Berio’s series of instrumental Sequenza pieces, composed over more than four decades. Sequenza XI for guitar (1987–8) incorporates flamenco and classical guitar traditions in an attempt to explore what the composer called ‘the passage between these two “histories”’ (Berio 1998: 20) while, harmonically speaking, articulating a continuum (by way of mostly semitone and whole-tone voice-leading) from the characteristic open-string sonority dominated by the perfect fourth to chords of greater harmonic and acoustic complexity. This kind of continuum from simple to complex sometimes involved negotiating degrees of familiarity and recognisability, and hence the use of quoted material. In Hymnen (1966–9), Stockhausen took around forty of the world’s national anthems, splicing and recombining them to achieve varied degrees of defamiliarisation and intermodulating them to create scarcely perceptible transitions from one to the next. Stockhausen’s work on Hymnen coincided with Pousseur’s on his Votre Faust (1960–8), an elaborate ‘fantaisie variable, genre opéra’ which embodied his harmonic model based on two- and three-dimensional networks (‘réseaux’), akin to the Tonnetze of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century harmonic theory (see Pousseur 1968). The network of the tonal triad has as its axes the intervals of the octave, fifth, and third. Modifying those axes – for instance, turning the octave into a minor ninth, the fifth into a minor sixth, and third into a perfect fourth – produces harmony more characteristic of Webern, whose ‘multipolar’ harmonic fields constitute the ‘special case’ from which
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Pousseur’s system is generalised. The ‘technique des réseaux’ underpins the whole spectrum of harmonic transformation in Votre Faust. ‘La chévauchée fantastique’ (1964–5), for piano and ad libitum soprano (the central movement of the satellite work Miroir de Votre Faust), ‘modulates’ by means of a chronological sequence of quotations, from Gluck (via Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Wagner, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) to Pousseur himself, in what he termed an ‘imperceptible stylistic glissando’ (Pousseur 2004: 331). This experiment would provide an influential precedent for a better-known collage of quotations, albeit assembled associatively rather than chronologically: the third movement of Berio’s Sinfonia (1968–9). Pousseur’s orchestral work Couleurs croisées (1967), composed in the United States at a decisive moment in the civil rights movement, featured transformations of the protest anthem ‘We Shall Overcome’. Pousseur clearly envisaged his system of harmonic networks as serving a democratic inclusiveness and openness, ‘a richer musical expression, more complex and better adapted to the relativistic and pluralistic reality of today’ (Pousseur 1970: 247). But others might read something uncomfortably Hegelian and totalising into this notion of an all-englobing ‘metasystem’ capable of ‘interpreting, integrating and coordinating all known musical systems’ (Pousseur 1970: 290). Such wide-ranging ambitions were nowhere clearer than in Stockhausen’s Licht (1977–2003), a cycle of seven operas for the days of the week lasting almost thirty hours. But, daunting as the scale of the project and its cosmic subject matter was, its serial elements are arguably nothing like as opaque to the listener as those in Stockhausen’s works of the 1950s. Central to the cycle is the ‘formula’, which goes beyond the note row in both specificity and intelligibility (see Kohl 1990). Most of Stockhausen’s formulae use all twelve notes, but typically as a sequence of registrally specific pitches, at times incorporating repeated notes in the same or different octaves (and even the occasional octave leap). Since the formula not only has a clear melodic contour but also incorporates rhythmic values (including rests), it is far closer to an actual melody than a Schoenbergian note row, and while it serves long-range structural functions as well, it is recognisable as a ‘theme’ on a local level too, aided by its generally moderate-to-slow pace of unfolding. In the later music of Berio, too, the seeming relaxation of harmonic tension is due less to a reduction in the pervasiveness of the twelve notes than to their entry over a longer timespan, in a manner that allows each note and each interval to be registered individually. A case in point is the orchestral Requies (in memoriam Cathy Berberian) (1983–5), with its long, selectively sustained melody,
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which one by one unfolds the notes of a fixed-register twelve-note pitch field over the first twenty bars. Even Boulez, whose harmonic language and gestural idiom had changed far less since the late 1950s, was moving increasingly towards a greater concern with the local articulation of gestures, the use of referential sonorities (at times analogous to pitch centres), and the priorities of perception in general (see Goldman 2011: esp. 63–70).
Conclusion By the end of the twentieth century, the totalising and universalising discourse in which serialism was often cloaked may have seemed dated, if not out-and-out hubristic. But undeniable at least was the way serialism had broken out in numerous different directions. Some composers were now using quasi-serial techniques in the context of a considerably transformed aesthetic and style, others were exploring the aesthetic consequences of combining autonomous parameters of sound and action, while still others continued to operate through the stylistic medium of a late-modernist soundworld without recourse (or, at least, acknowledged recourse) to serial techniques. Meanwhile the term ‘post-serial’ continued to be used much as it always had been – either as a convenient shorthand for a selective and eclectic use of serial devices, or even now to compensate for the commentator’s confusion as to what such devices were present at all. But ever more apparent were the commonalities with serialism to be found even in music that styled itself as a reaction against it. Minimal music, for instance, may have seemed worlds away from serialism on account of its high degree of redundancy and repetition and its often (pan-)diatonic pitch framework. And yet the idea of the ‘automatic’ process left to ‘run its course’ without further compositional intervention, exaggeratedly invoked with reference to works of generalised serialism, is arguably far truer of the early process pieces of Steve Reich (see Gann 2006). Similar observations might be made of the canonic, isorhythmic, and rotational procedures in the music of Arvo Pärt, whose ‘break’ with serialism in the mid-1970s can in retrospect be seen as aesthetic or stylistic rather than technical in nature (see Clarke 1993). And just as the more arcane forms of serial permutation had sought constant self-renewal, so ‘automatism’ of process remains prized for its ability to generate the non-identical in the guise of the identical: the quasi-ostinato textures in a work such as Per Nørgård’s Second Symphony (1970/1) avoid internal repetition through
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their dependence on the ‘infinity series’ – integer-modelled patterns that, when replicated on different levels, give rise to a nested self-symmetry that has more to do with fractal geometry than any quasi-Schenkerian hierarchy (see Christensen 2004: 107–15). Others have seen the legacy of serial thought more in the technological realm. Georgina Born characterises the ‘discourse of post-serialism’ as pursuing ‘the systematic combination of scientific and technological analysis and generation of sound materials for composition while loosening any necessary commitment to serial organisation’ (Born 1995: 52). Perhaps the most significant such attempt is represented by the spectral music of Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, and Kajia Saariaho, music which, as Liam Cagney has convincingly argued, was nonetheless shaped by a ‘critique and reformulation’ of the serial, and reflected a similar ‘desire . . . to coin a new, generalisable compositional system’ (Cagney 2019: 401). And here too the path from system to score is not quite as literal as is sometimes assumed: between sound spectra and notated sonority, a significant degree of ‘expedient readjustment’ intervenes. Ultimately, perhaps, the foregrounding of this tension between system and realisation, between ‘eye’ and ‘ear’, may be one of serialism’s most potent legacies. Repeatedly emphasised in Boulez’s last major set of lectures was the free flow ‘between virtual idea and real idea – between projecting a generalised idea containing the means of its realisation and a fully realised, restricted idea that can proliferate, expanding into a generalised concept’ (Boulez 2018: 564). While serialism was known for adopting the former approach, namely proceeding from the generalised idea, Brian Ferneyhough has spoken of his preference for the latter, starting with a ‘fully composed-out’ musical event, which is then broken down into its ‘parametric variables’ (Boros 1990: 24). But just as the boundary between the ‘serial’ and the ‘post-serial’ remains blurred, so, with hindsight, does the gap appear to narrow between serial composition in particular and key aspects of the literate compositional tradition in general. Serialism, as this chapter has suggested, was never as undialectical as what Nono perjoratively dubbed ‘the concretisation of preformed structures’ (Nono 1975: 200). More often it reflected the need to encounter something ‘other’ – whether a system of generation or a specific type of material – in order to make ‘other’, to create something that the self alone could not achieve through solipsistic reliance on its own instincts. Helmut Lachenmann has spoken of serial means as ‘an aid to invention’, to which one relates ‘as a sculptor relates to a chanced-upon unhewed stone’, in a way that ‘helps [the] imagination beyond its own limits’ (Lachenmann 1996: 148). There has been a marked tendency, in the wake of an influential
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essay by Dahlhaus, to see the notion of the ‘demands of the material’ purely as a fiction, a pretended objectivity designed to mask the subjective, autonomous decision-making of the composer (Dahlhaus 1987). But, like Lachenmann’s unhewed stone, which can resist a purposeful human onslaught, choosing to fracture that way rather than this, so musical materials have their inbuilt resistances and affordances – not least the intrinsic combinatorial constraints of the equal-tempered chromaticism with which so many serial composers have grappled and which set-class theory, itself an offshoot of serial theory, sought to chart (see Schuijer 2008). If fewer composers now profess an overt allegiance to serialism, what nonetheless survives for many is that need for an explicit confrontation with questions of material and process, with the challenges they pose to a body of inherited techniques and aesthetics, and their ability to throw up surprising and unforeseeable gestures – albeit ones that may, in time, become absorbed into an inherited apparatus and thus coalesce into style. Perhaps, therefore, the varied metamorphoses of the serial, however characterised, are best viewed as phases in a longer history of composers’ dialogue with sound, its abstract tokens no more – but also no less – than its concrete reality.
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Technologies and the Serial Attitude jennifer iverson
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Serialism is often attached to a familiar canon of pieces: Pierre Boulez’s Structures I and II (1952, 1961), Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel (1952), Milton Babbitt’s All Set (1957) – these are in heavy rotation in textbooks, anthologies, and our classrooms. If my students and I extracted a definition of the musical practice from these exemplars, we could probably agree upon the following: (1) serialism is primarily manifest in acoustic music; (2) precompositional charts allow composers to organise musical elements as discrete bits, enabling a ‘total’ systematisation involving several parameters (pitch, rhythm, timbre, articulation, etc.); (3) serialism depends upon order and pattern completion, as the music proceeds through iterations of the series. Serialism, as I often teach and conceptualise it, is situated as a mid-century, institutional, White, high-art, modernist phenomenon. My students and I rehearse familiar critical conversations too, observing that integral serialism hews uncomfortably close, in both sound and method, to the chance operations of John Cage’s Music of Changes (1951). The sonic and conceptual binds of the total control/total chance paradox were, after all, already part of serialism’s internal discourse, articulated in the exchanges between Boulez and Cage, in the self-reflexive critiques of mid-century composers such as György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis, in reviews by hostile contemporaries such as John Backus and George Perle, and recapitulated by later historians such as Richard Taruskin and M. J. Grant (Backus 1962; Grant 2001; Ligeti 1960a; Perle 1960; Nattiez 1993; Taruskin 2005b: 37–44; Xenakis 1956). The scope and complexity of this volume already complicates these simplistic but sticky textbook definitions, namely that serialism is primarily about acoustic music, discrete bits, order, and pattern completion. This chapter will further unsettle these core assumptions by focusing on the ways that technologies – both analogue and digital – contribute to the formation of a serial attitude in music. Several questions form a starting point: How does electronic technology impinge upon, or even generate, serial thought? How is serialism in music distinguished from serial thought in computing more broadly, and should it be? What does it mean to translate music into discrete bits? Can hip hop and electronic dance
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music (EDM) – with their bit-like combinatorics, their shuffling of fixed musical cells – exhibit a serial attitude? Must serial music sound like the academic serialism of the above-mentioned canonical pieces? Does serialism exist outside of mid-century modernist academic music? What are serialism’s boundaries and limits? My hypothesis is this: serialism is not easily contained as a set of techniques. It is not just a way of composing at a particular time and place, nor is it reducible to a single aesthetic posture. Instead, a ‘serial attitude’ is developed in multiple locales as technologies are integrated into music-making. I push forward from the mid-century moment, arguing that serial music is developed at an interface with machines in various technomusical scenarios, ranging from the analogue studio to early computer music, to hip hop and EDM. As such, I aim to unseat serialism’s midcentury modernist hegemony, extending the understanding of the scope, definition, and limits of serial attitudes as developed cooperatively with technologies. One important disclaimer: I organise this essay chronologically (from mid-century electronic studios, to early computer music scenes, to DJbased technologies), but I do not mean to imply influence or genealogy. There is not a linear relationship between the institutional avant-garde studios of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) or Columbia-Princeton and subsequent generations of electronic artists, whose ideas grow and develop in their own particular technical, historical, and aesthetic circumstances. I am more interested in the ways that serial ideas are shaped in conjunction with machinic affordances in various scenarios (see Gibson 2005). From the outset, I would like to suspend the commonplace idea that Stockhausen, Boulez, Babbitt, and Cage are the originators of interesting musical ideas, and that cultural production necessarily trickles down from institutional, high-art, prestige milieus. I hope this will allow a sharper focus upon the shaping influence of particular technological affordances. I ask with curiosity whether several disparate scenes might serve as boundary cases for a serial attitude, if not a genealogical bond.
In the Analogue Studio Serialism, in common parlance, has roots in the 1920s dodecaphony of Schoenberg (and perhaps Hauer), while its ‘integral’ phase begins with 1950s avant-garde acoustic music – this prefigured in Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (1949), or if you buy the mythology of the post-war
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European avant-garde, Webern’s re-orchestration of the Ricercar from Bach’s Art of Fugue (1935) (Boulez 1991k: 299; Ligeti 2007d; Samuel 1976: 25). Despite these prevalent mythologies, serial thought did not begin exclusively at any one of these moments. Serialism – of the canonical, mid-century, acoustic sort – is obviously premised on a kind of digital thinking: namely, that music can be reduced to discrete bits, whose orders are managed by a compositional system. It is tempting to connect the rise of musical serialism to the rise of computing and digital thought in the twentieth century. And yet, as Roger Moseley argues, the historical scope is much larger. Much of music, from Ancient Greece to Renaissance counterpoint, to Baroque partimenti, to nineteenth-century mechanical inventions, is in some way digital (Moseley 2016: 49–117). Via keyboards especially, music is digital when it is composed for the discrete digits of the fingers. Notations are discrete renderings of continuous sound waves. Pitches are either on or off. Simultaneously, though, music is and has always been analogue – music is also about breath, wind, continuity, and sound waves (Krukowski 2017). It is not quite accurate to think about how music is digital without thinking about how it is also analogue. I will spend quite a bit of time musing over the analogue–digital dialectic in this chapter, so it will be useful to keep this framework in mind. Mid-century acoustic serialists, working with an essentially digital system of discrete bits, matrices, and orders, already found it challenging to manage the encroaching analogue parameters of timbre, dynamics, and articulations. These so-called ‘secondary’ parameters, which are more obviously continuously rather than discretely scaled, were much more difficult to plot on a matrix than pitch and duration (Meyer 1967: 247– 8). The analogue problem was articulated even more strongly when the same composers encountered electronic technologies that prioritised sweeps, ranges, and continua. Composers came into the Cologne WDR studio with big dreams and calculated serial sketches that specified values in several parameters (frequency, duration, timbre, etc.). Cooperating with their technicians, they spent time tuning generators and filters to specific frequencies, building new timbres partial-by-partial, and cutting tape to predetermined lengths Iverson 2017a, 2017b. Consider Stockhausen’s Studie II (1954), with its additive synthesis timbres layered up from square root–derived inharmonic partials, and Gottfried Michael Koenig’s Essay (1957), with its iterative, proportional durations manifest in precise tape lengths (Iverson 2019: 105–93). Despite these discrete, calculated, best-laid plans, the mid-century serial composers encountered frustration and failure in the studio. They had to
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temper their disciplined digital exactitude almost immediately. First, composers and technicians found that realising such exact, precise serial plans took an enormous – an impractically enormous – amount of time. Moreover, on my reading, electronic composers were still smarting from the circulating critique of acoustic serial music – namely, that it overwhelmed the listener with too many discrete bits, too much information, and therefore numbed attention (cf. Babbitt 1958). Composers wanted to use studio technologies to construct entirely new timbres and deftly nested forms, but their early experiments amounted to electronic versions of acoustic pointillism – a dissatisfying, disorienting wash of even more alienating bleeps and bloops. In response to these aesthetic and technical hurdles, composers and technicians began to experiment with shortcuts and improvisations that were both more efficient and more effective. ‘Statistical form’, developed by Stockhausen and Koenig, used the discrete bits of a series to set boundaries but filled in those boundaries gesturally with approximations (Iverson 2014b). This methodology – serialised limits filled with improvised contents – was much more amenable to the analogue studio with its myriad knobs and dials. Imagine Stockhausen and his technician Koenig improvising the hand-sketched curves of Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) by turning the knobs of a pulse generator, thereby filling a predetermined, serial duration with gradually accelerating pulses (Stockhausen 2001; Williams 2015, 2016). Imagine them turning the volume knobs to create swells and recording these volume curves upon the piece’s serially determined pitch mixtures, durations, and articulation envelopes in much the same way matrices for various parameters were overlaid in acoustic serial works. Does starting to turn knobs mean departing from serialism? Continua introduce inherently analogue traits into what had previously been a mostly digital mindset, but I am unconvinced that this is incommensurate with a serial attitude. The studio composer encountered a starker, more pressing version of the acoustic composer’s secondary-parameter conundrum. Given analogue studio technologies, their dreamed-for digital, parametric, compositional processes had to be adjusted away from purity. It is helpful to remember that composers of this era moved freely between the studio and the concert hall, composing both electronic and acoustic music from the same technical, conceptual, and aesthetic commitments. In some cases, composers realised acoustic versions of pieces that failed in the studio; in other cases, composers set into the studio with plans that would be too difficult for human performers to realise. The flow between acoustic and electronic versions of serialism is robust. The mid-century
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composer had to find a way to be both serial and continuous, both digital and analogue. The ‘statistical’ or analogue adaptations made in the late 1950s, WDR studio definitely improved the efficiency with which composers realised their plans, but also allowed for headway on trenchant perceptual problems – particularly those that overwhelmed listeners. Composers incorporated much knowledge from Werner Meyer-Eppler (a former Nazi scientist, WDR studio founder, and University of Bonn professor), who taught the composers how to integrate acoustics and human perception into their serial electronic works (Ungeheuer 1992; Iverson 2020). MeyerEppler’s perceptual orientation is reflected, for example, in Stockhausen’s famous ‘. . . how time passes . . .’ essay, in which he showed that pitch and rhythm flow along the same continuum (Stockhausen 1959). Koenig’s concept of Bewegungsfarbe [moving sound-colour] – piloted in Koenig’s electronic piece Essay (1957) and further exploited by György Ligeti in the acoustic harpsichord piece Continuum (1968) – is a sonic manifestation of this insight. The basic idea is that small discrete bits, that is, pitches or pulses heard at very short durations, can transform into a timbral continuum depending on whether the succession is played fast enough to induce a blurring effect in the brain of the listener. In these pieces, serialism became about perception as much as order. Mid-century serialism became a discourse about how to make continua from discrete bits, and vice versa (Ungeheuer 1994, 1997). In other words, mid-century serialism trafficked along the continuum between analogue and digital ways of making, thinking, and hearing. The WDR composers arrived here because of analogue knobs and also because of their exposure, via Meyer-Eppler, to the key concepts of information theory (Iverson 2019: 105–38). Claude Shannon’s 1949 equation called attention not only to the discrete, measurable amount of information in a message (the bits), but also to its repetitions, redundancies, and interruptions as expressed in a variable or noisy channel. A key part of the information-theory equation – the sampling theorem – speculated about how a continuous entity like a sound wave could be segmented into bits and sampled fast enough that there would be no loss of intelligible, communicated information, despite a measurable reduction in quality and size of the message. Information theory was useful during the war for several applications, including calculating bomb trajectories and designing code-breaking systems. Meyer-Eppler had used such information-theoretic concepts in designing signal-extraction systems for the Nazi military’s Kriegsmarine and building electronic larynges similar to Bell Labs’ Voder.
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Though information theory concepts were amenable to adaptation in a wide variety of fields, language was a particularly salient realm for experimenting (Iverson 2019: 167–93). In Meyer-Eppler’s seminars, Stockhausen remembered cutting up newspaper articles into words, syllables, and eventually phonemes, and then rearranging the bits to study the redundancies (Kurtz 1992: 70). It is the same procedure that Ligeti analogously used in Artikulation (1957) to randomly join several different types of electronically generated sounds. Mauricio Kagel waded deeply into phonetic experiments in the serial acoustic piece Anagrama (1958), where he used phonemes (such as the vowels e, o, u and the consonants n, g, and s) as the discrete bits (Kassel 2004). These linguistic sounds became models for musical timbres in Kagel’s parallel electronic piece Transicíon I (1958). In both, the phonemes are organised into continua (such as u–ü–i–ü–u and ooo–nnn–sss) that produce timbral morphing, via human singers or sine-tone oscillators and white-noise generators. The particular affordances of analogue machines and information theory discourses demonstrate how and why the mid-century serial attitude evolved. The knobs and dials of the machinery invited composers to explore not only how to produce discrete data points, but also how to create connections between them. Composers simultaneously learned new discourses – particularly information theory and experimental phonetics – that shaped their understanding of human perception as a continuous and fluctuating capacity. This, in turn, greatly shaped their thinking on musical issues such as timbre, duration, succession, and repetition. The midcentury iteration of serialism was navigated in cooperation with the physical technologies of the analogue studio as well as with the conceptual technologies of information theory and phonetics. The evolution in midcentury serial thought – an evolution from ordered bits to perceptual continua – was largely accomplished as digitally thinking composers navigated the new technologies and new ideas of the analogue electronic studio.
In Early Computer Music As the transition from analogue to digital technologies began in the late 1950s – as nascent computing grew in several different Cold War locales – composers continued to evaluate the relationships between discrete bits, continuities, and serially controlled orders. Early digital technologies, such as punch cards and binary code, were particularly amenable to the parametric thinking familiar from the first 1950s post-war phase of serialism, with its
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programmed acoustic matrices. And yet the WDR analogue studio-inspired continuities, continua, and timbre-building projects did not disappear from serial thought, not least because some early computing technologies remained analogue in concept and execution. I will consider early computer music scenes in the Netherlands, at Bell Labs in New Jersey, and at the Columbia-Princeton electronic studio, in each case exploring the overlapping analogue and digital practices that shaped the second 1960s stage of serial practice.
Holland Gottfried Michael Koenig dreamed early of extending serial music with digital computing, first studying computer technology and programming at the University of Bonn in the early 1960s while he was still a WDR studio technician and composer. He was then recruited away from Cologne to establish an electronic studio at Utrecht University in 1963, which contained, amongst other technologies, an X1 Electrologue. (The following paragraphs draw upon the author’s interview with Koenig, 10 May 2015; see also Iverson (2016) and Tazelaar (2013).) Koenig sensed the possibilities of computing even before they were fully materialised, believing that a computer program could automate some of the tedium of the studio – for instance, tuning generators, iterating sequences, transposing frequencies, changing periodicities – while simultaneously holding out hope that a computer could be programmed to produce new musical sounds more efficiently and effectively than the analogue studio technology. Koenig was disappointed, then, to realise that early computing technology was entirely insufficient for sound synthesis. Even if the X1 Electrologue could be told to build a sound wave – and that was a big ‘if’, given that cumbersome punch cards of binary Fortran code were no match for the complexity of sound waves – the Utrecht centre lacked a digital-toanalogue converter (a missing technology that, where it did exist, was often built from scratch or housed in a separate location, and with the added challenges of shared use and significant processing power and time) (Manning 2013: 191–2). Such technological hurdles – shared use, delays, absent equipment, insufficient processing power – shaped the path of serial music because composers pragmatically turned attention to what was possible with the machine, rather than what was at the moment cumbersome or impossible. While others involved in early computer music explored the question of sound generation (more on that in a moment), Koenig turned his attention to that other serial question: order.
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He began to focus, in the programs Project 1 (1964) and Project 2 (1966), on controlling and permuting the relationships between sounds with simple commands such as ‘do’, ‘if-then’, and ‘go to’. Project 1 developed an interdependence between the number of pitches in a chord and the chord’s duration. Project 2 introduced more musical parameters (instruments, pitches, durations, articulations, dynamic values, and delays), which the composer could specify and make dependent upon one another (Koenig n. d.). The basic questions concerned syntax: are parameters independent or dependent on one another? How should different parameters of musical sound be balanced? How should sounds be ordered in relationship with one another, so as to produce music? What in music is programmable? With Projects 1 and 2, Koenig momentarily suspended his interest in sound synthesis in order to explore his understanding that music (as opposed to the more general sound) was fundamentally about relationships. This was not because Koenig was no longer interested in the serial timbre building, via additive synthesis and vocal filtering, that had preoccupied the Cologne studio composers. In fact, his Sound Synthesis Program (1971) later tackled this harder aspect. But in the nascent early years of computer music, Koenig recognised that, given bit-based binary punch cards, slow CPU processors, and absent digital-to-analogue converters, it was more possible to permute musical relationships. If music is about both sound quality and order, amongst many other things, the technologies of the early computer music studio could at least be marshalled towards questions of order, syntax, and organisation. The computer could produce scores that a human musician could test out. At least, this was the necessary pragmatism of early 1960s computing; by the time the technology was capable of fully dealing with such a complex set of problems, there was somewhat less interest in the answers.
Bell Labs While Koenig’s Projects exhibited a certain pragmatism, engineers at Bell Labs (Max Mathews, Joan Miller, John Pierce, and others), used digital technology to pursue the sound synthesis question in earnest. Bell Labs, headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey, was a curious mélange of domestic communication engineering, military technology contracts, and experimental research on topics ranging from cybernetics to deafness to music (Gertner 2012; Mills 2011, 2012). Technicians, engineers, scientists, and composers employed there participated in diffuse knowledge-transfer networks, including dialogues with leading European scientists like Meyer-
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Eppler and Abraham Moles. Engineers had long leashes to collaborate and explore adjacent arenas, since Bell Labs’ research-and-development philosophy was that ancillary knowledge might well inform the company’s central communication engineering questions. Bell Labs went so far as to fund research fellowships for technologically savvy visiting composers, a position that James Tenney (1961–4), Jean-Claude Risset (1964–5 and 1967–9), and Nam Jun Paik (1967–8) all held (Kahn 2012; Kaizen 2012; Risset n.d.). It was in this collaborative laboratory culture that musically interested engineers applied information theory insights to sound synthesis in the MUSICn series of computer programs. While this research group may not have understood its work as explicitly serial – they were not necessarily in the main stream of academic music composition though they were aware of it – they nevertheless enacted a programmed, ordered, digital attitude to sound synthesis. Beginning with MUSIC I (1957), the team programmed an IBM 704 and a D-to-A converter to produce a triangle wave, subsequently adding sonic complexity as they iterated newer versions of the MUSICn programs for newer computers. Mathews’s Numerology (1962), produced with an IBM 7094 running MUSIC III (1960) or MUSIC IV (1962), can be fruitfully compared with Tenney’s concurrent compositions emerging from the Bell Labs partnership. Admittedly, Mathews’s Numerology – and the 1962 Bell Labs album Music from Mathematics (Decca DL9103) on which it appears, alongside Tenney’s Analog #1 (Noise Study) (1961) – was offered more as proof of concept than as an aesthetic tome, but it nevertheless gives us a sense of what was sonically possible with the early MUSICn programs. Mathews’s two-and-a-half-minute-long piece foregrounds several different computersynthesized timbres, including one resembling a slide-whistle, a warbling soprano- or violin-like tone recalling the uncanny vocal-ish sound of Voder-produced vowels, and a gurgling, thrumming, muddy, bass timbre. In Numerology, Mathews organised those sounds sectionally, creating several simple diatonic melodies reminiscent of children’s songs (elsewhere on the album, Mathews synthesizes ‘Frère Jacques’ and ‘Bicycle Built for Two’) (Holmes 2016: 293–7; Manning 2013: 187–96). The modern-day listener would probably find the computer-generated sound world of the early MUSICn computer music most aurally comparable to 8-bit video-game sound effects. Such sounds appear prominently in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when HAL, the malevolent computer, sings a synthesized ‘Bicycle Built for Two’ as he’s being murdered by the human astronaut. Perhaps ironically, though, the film locates its sonic,
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futuristic, conceptual immensity in the lush, enigmatic clusters of Ligeti’s orchestral sound-mass music (drawn from Atmosphères, Lontano, and the Requiem) rather than in Mathews’s bit of contemporary computer music. Both in reality and in Kubrick’s filmic imagination, the acoustic, analogue version of sound synthesis far exceeded the digital. The composer James Tenney helped Mathews develop the timbre synthesis algorithms for the MUSICn computer programs in use on Music from Mathematics, but the principal focus of Tenney’s own compositional activity was psychoacoustic experiments, musique concrète, noise, and performance art. Right before joining the Bell Labs team, Tenney made a piece called Collage #1 (‘Blue Suede’) (1961), which denatured snippets of Elvis’s ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ with tape techniques such as speeding, slowing, and reversing, and then montaged the samples (some more recognisable than others) with noise and generated sounds. Tenney’s first piece made at Bell Labs, Noise Study, slowly unfolded noise bands of varying width, dynamics, and timbre. He shaped the noise bands, via long crescendi and decrescendi, into undulating waves that seemed to gradually roll in to shore. Tenney used an analogue white-noise generator for Noise Study, a piece of equipment that he asked Pierce to buy for him at the beginning of his residency. As Tenney explained: From the very beginning of my work at Bell, I said I want to start with the whole world of sound, so what kind of programming structure would I have to design here that would have all the variables needed to get that noise that I just heard down the street? (Quoted in Kahn 2012: 138)
It turns out, one needed quite a bit more than was available in the binary digits of the early MUSICn programs. Tenney complained that the Bell Labs engineers ‘just wanted to make tones. So there was no noise generator, no envelope generator, no band pass filter’ (quoted in Kahn 2012: 138). It may have been theoretically possible early in the MUSICn programs to construct (serial) timbres digitally, but as in the early additive synthesis experiments of the WDR studio, the resulting sounds were often fairly primitive. Tenney only achieved satisfactory musical results in the early 1960s by continuing to use the analogue technologies of recorded sound, noise generators, and filters. The MUSICn programs – iterated in more than ten versions throughout the 1960s and 1970s and extended further in the open-source CSOUND (1985–present) – eventually became sophisticated ways of designing (serial) timbres, incorporating code to replicate the noise bands, filtering, envelope-shaping functions, and more. It’s worth noting, though, that it
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took several more years and collaborations – at the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique (IRCAM) in Paris (Born 1995), at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) in Stanford (Nelson 2015), at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and elsewhere – before musically convincing timbres could be produced by newer generations of computers, and – as elegant, simplified timbre synthesis algorithms were developed – by new mass-market synthesizers such as the Yamaha DX7. It’s true that neither the MUSICn programs, nor Mathews’s or Tenney’s pieces of the early 1960s, were explicitly serial in design (though David Lewin’s Study No. 1 and Study No. 2 also made with MUSIC III or IV were). The serial attitude of the Bell Labs circle, however, is evident in the parametric thinking that parses both sounds and musical scores into bits that can be controlled and ordered by a computer program. Despite their limitations, the MUSICn programs demonstrated one plausible future for serial computer music, a future that Koenig would also pursue: using computer programs to control both the timbral production (replacing the ‘instrument’) and the musical syntax (replacing the ‘score’).
Columbia-Princeton Nearby in Princeton, New Jersey, engineers at the research-anddevelopment laboratory of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) were working with similar ideas as they developed experimental synthesizers called the RCA Mark I (c. 1955) and Mark II (c. 1960). RCA’s aim was to develop a computer-controlled synthesizer for the production of hit records – imagined as a way to add profit and efficiency to their imbricated projects of recording, radio broadcasting, and television – but the technology they developed turned out to be more useful for producing niche, highart serial music than for producing hit records. The Mark II, a prototype first leased and eventually gifted to the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio, used a digital interface to cue relay switches operating a plethora of analogue equipment inside the machine: oscillators, generators, filters, portamento gliders, octave shifters, and more. In other words, the Mark II was both digital and analogue. It used a primitive computer interface of binary code (0s and 1s), repeated in five channels in a punchcard programming mechanism, to drive a studio’s worth of analogue sound equipment (Holmes 2016: 190–206; Manning 2013: 83–98; Patterson 2011).
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The parametric thinking that characterised both Koenig’s Projects and Bell Labs’ MUSICn software was even more obvious in the Mark II. Engineers Henry Olson and Herbert Belar began by analysing the physical components of sound – frequency, loudness, wave forms, envelope, and time – and then related these to the musical functions of pitch, volume, timbre, envelope, and rhythm via the punch-card interface (Olson and Belar 1955; Olson, Belar, and Timmens 1960). The machine they produced was thus highly amenable to the parametric musical categorisation that Milton Babbitt pursued in his serial works, as the music-to-punch-card translation in Figure 20.1 shows. Such parametric thinking was not just a product of the digital age; it was already present in the purely acoustic late-1940s and 1950s serialism, as it was in both chance-based and indeterminate works of John Cage, such as Music of Changes and Variations I. And yet RCA’s Mark II was an ideal system for realising such parametric music, enabling, in the words of Peter Manning, ‘a seemingly effortless transition from a strictly ordered style of instrumental writing to an electronic equivalent’ (Manning 2013: 97). The Mark II only heightened the degree to which Babbitt could realise his meticulously organised serial scores, with the precision of the punch cards circumventing the fallibility of ‘recalcitrant performers’ (Babbitt 1964: 262; cf. Maconie 2011 and Morris 1997). Curiously – or perhaps not, given widespread technological fascination at mid-century – several other composers put the Mark II to quite different ends than Babbitt’s rigid integral serialism. Consider the underground cult classic Leiyla and the Poet (1961) made at the Columbia-Princeton Studio by the Egyptian-American composer Halim El-Dabh (Gluck 2007). The
Figure 20.1 Milton Babbitt sketch, perhaps for Composition for Synthesizer (1961) or Ensembles for Synthesizer (1964), showing how music notation was translated into the five channel parameters of the RCA Mark II. Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center Records, 1958 2014. Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries. Temporary inventory box CPEMC 00264
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five-minute-long musique concrète piece mixed Mark II-generated sounds, spoken word recitations, and the recorded sounds of Egyptian folk instruments such as the darabukka hand drums and the stringed oud. El-Dabh programmed the Mark II to produce synthesized whistles, percussive burbles, and noisy sweeps, which punctuate his evocative aural collage. ElDabh’s musical experimentation began in Egypt in the mid-1940s, when he produced musique concrète (before it was a recognised category and likely before, or concurrent with, Pierre Schaeffer’s experiments). El-Dabh captured the voices of women singing in a zaar ceremony with a wire recorder and manipulated them with radio equipment; no surprise, then, that his use of the Mark II differed substantially from Babbitt’s iterative, parametricised, musico-mathematical programs. Similarly, Wendy Carlos – in pre-Switched on Bach (1968) days a musiccomposition student at Columbia University – experimented with the Mark II in pieces like Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers (1963), Variations for Flute and Electronic Sound (1964), and Episodes for Piano and Electronic Sound (1964) (Sewell 2020), though she rejected the serial rigidity of Babbitt and his followers: They seemed to offer ONLY dodecaphonic, or serial, atonal fare, and other quite severe, generally ugly styles. That was not for me, and contrariwise, those of us who tried to find other less restrictive musical styles and genres were not what the new group wanted to play, either. A standoff. So several other composer friends and I decided to restart the earlier Columbia Composers [concert series] program. For the three years I attended, we presented new music in a broad selection of styles and media, and carried on the earlier tradition the best we could. We rented McMillin Theater (now Miller), designed and printed our own programs (we’d cart our master sheets down to ERS offset printers downtown), much as amateur perform ers have always managed. I still have nostalgic thoughts about some of those concert experiences . . . ! (Carlos n.d.)
Despite Carlos’s distaste for Babbitt’s rigid parametric serialism, an electronic fragment like her Geodesic Dance (c. 1975), in which geodesic dome proportions provide the temporal shapes and rhythms, has some resonances with serialism’s emphasis on proportions and intervallic relations. Carlos’s serial attitude in a piece like Geodesic Dance emphasises the separability of parameters, at least insofar as they can be extracted and recombined in new ways, to new effects, as in quadraphonic sound. Likewise for the rhythmic experiments advanced by John Pierce on the Music from Mathematics album. In pieces like Five Against Seven–Random Canon and Melodie, Pierce programmed the computer to produce
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conflicting rhythmic patterns that were difficult or impossible for those recalcitrant – or simply human – performers. Consider also Tenney’s Music for Player Piano (1964), which passed off similar impossible-tohumans rhythmic tasks on the machine-operated piano. Bell Labs’ IBM computers could shine here: the separate, parallel channels of a primitive digital machine easily handled such differentiated rhythmic streams. In these instances, we see serial-adjacent composers like El-Dabh, Carlos, Pierce, and Tenney using early digital technology for somewhat different ends from the rigid parametric serialism promulgated by Babbitt. By standing on the analogue–digital divide and interacting with the parametric thinking encoded in early digital machines – as extracted from traditional, machinic, analogue devices – composers found new ways to elaborate issues of syntax, order, and coordination in their music. They experimented with a serial attitude even when they weren’t entirely ensconced in a strict serial practice.
In Sampling Cultures If electronic and computer music scenes have a strong aesthetic and technical correlation with serialism – indeed are central to mid-century, academic, integral serialism – then drawing such connections with the vernacular music in the rest of this chapter is less familiar. I would like to explore the ways that sample-based music – both EDM and hip hop – may exhibit a serial attitude, not least because of the prolific use of drum machines, samplers, and sequencers. The pivot is tenuous for several reasons: first, outside of the usual historical and aesthetic locales of serial practice (in White mid-century academic institutions), one wonders whether it even makes sense to trace a serial attitude, to use those concepts and definitions. In short, serialism is habitually studied as a historically, socio-culturally, and aesthetically constrained idea, even if we fail to admit as much. Secondly, though moving forward in historical time, I do not seek a chain of influence that connects mid-century iterations of serialism (either analogue or digital) to sample-based musics of the late 1970s to 2010s. Instead, I seek to notice and explore certain conceptual and technical similarities between de rigueur serialism and various sample-based musics, similarities underwritten by encounters with technology. The juxtaposition is tricky, though, as Amir Said points out. Any argument that draws together hip hop with Western music theorising (or vernacular music with high-art music, or Black music with White/
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European music) frequently stages the comparison in the terms of the dominant culture, privileging the modes, values, and attitudes of White, European high-art music (Said 2013: 306–7). I’m definitely not interested in reifying a damaged (and damaging) value hierarchy, in which White, academic, mid-century serialism is judged the only true serialism. Nor would I be interested in an argument that ‘elevated’ hip hop and EDM as worthy objects of study by proving that they exhibit serial features. Hip hop, EDM, and music of all kinds are worthy of study on their own terms. The posture I’m after here is one of observation, even curiosity, in noticing similar features in disparate musics, not least because technological affordance is a crucial factor in each scenario. Once vernacular composers sit down at a DAW, a sequencer, or a drum machine, their thinking and acting has resonance with the mid-century modernists who were programming music in the analogue or computer music studio. My analysis in this section aims to clarify resonances as well as differences within these serial attitudes. I’m going to spend some time listening closely to and describing the music as heard – more so than in the previous sections. I hope this will provide an opportunity to contemplate the quasiserial features that are embedded in the music, as well as the technologies with which it was constructed. It is hard to know what to do with a juxtaposition that is neither a genealogy nor a value metric, but I ask the reader to entertain the ideas outside of these more familiar modes of comparison. This is an experiment. A first observation, then, might notice the ways that sample-based musics return to the same fundamental obsession of serial composers: managing discrete bits and programming orders, especially with the help of technologies. This is immediately obvious in the late 1970s and early 1980s proto-electronic dance music of the Yellow Magic Orchestra (hereafter YMO), a Japanese group who were fond of humorously parodying Westerners’ Orientalist fantasies (Hayashi 2017). The band’s three members (Haruomi Hosono, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Yukihiro Takahashi) brought together their various previous experiences – as rock, glam, and jazz session musicians, as experimenters with drum machines and synths, and as composers of academic electronic music – to produce techno-pop that referenced an assortment of genres and styles. I’ll begin by listening closely and analysing what this proto-EDM techno-pop contains, before exploring how, and with what technology, it was made. ‘Technopolis’, the first track from the album Solid State Survivor (1979), is paradigmatic. Like many of the band’s songs, it is highly modular at all levels, from the layered grooves to the repeated bit-like melodies, to the
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sectional form. The piece begins with a futuristic, distorted, Vocoder-like voice speaking ‘Tokyo’ (perhaps the technopolis in question), a timbre that marks the groove section on all its returns (see Figure 20.2). The groove section itself (X) is composed of several layers – a funk bass line of quavers, a major-second synth melody soon doubled in a fauxbourdon series of parallel fourths, glistening high-frequency octaves, and disco-like organ chords. Above this groove, the modular blocks of A, B, and C melodies rotate in and out. The A module is a G minor ascending Japanese-style melody, whose plucked-string synth timbre and sol-le-sol ornament together seem to solidify the Asian reference. (YMO’s self-conscious orientalising – from their cheeky band name to the raced sounds they invoke – is a signature of their style, one that is somewhat uncomfortable then and now.) The B module switches to a flute-like synth timbre and a descending contour, circling down from me to sol before turning back upwards again to close the back half of the circle. The C module is a canon of two synth trumpets chasing each other through an ascending G major pentascale (do re mi fa sol) at the distance of two beats. The meter throughout, perhaps unsurprisingly, is a boxy 4 ; the A, B, 4 and C modules are each four bars long in simplest iteration, but typically occupy eight bars of space in each appearance of the form diagram of Figure 20.2; when modules are further extended or truncated, it is by +/− four measures. In the first half of the track sections follow one another in simple alternation; in the second half, melodic modules are superimposed and combined – B″ is the flute melody overlaid with the trumpet canon of the C module. This layered B″ section, alternating with the groove-oriented Vocoder beats of the X groove, take ‘Technopolis’ to its conclusion. The music’s contained regularity accrues across several domains: motives are timbrally distinct, melodically circular, and self-repeating; they fit neatly within an extremely regular metric grid; phrasal repetitions occur in multiples of four. Sections shift with regularity, cycling through self-contained blocks of musical material that are clearly distinct and hardly porous to each other. It is easy to see, in retrospect, how YMO (aka ‘the Japanese Kraftwerk’) prefigures the electronic dance music that
Figure 20.2 Yellow Magic Orchestra, ‘Technopolis’, sectional formal plan. Dotted line marks temporal halfway point. X = groove, A = Japanese melody, B = flute melody, C = trumpet canon
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would explode over the next two decades. But what does YMO’s modular techno-pop have to do with a serial attitude? One correspondence is that YMO’s discrete bits and programmed orders flow from machinic affordances. YMO used a Roland MC-8 MicroComposer on their first two albums, an early (but not the first) music sequencer launched by the Japanese company in 1977. A sequencer is a small computer that stores musical sounds or phrases, allowing them to be triggered at the desired time in live performance, recording, or another playback scenario. Sequencers, in their pure form, don’t produce sounds themselves but rather store phrases; in a few more years, of course, Roland, Yamaha, and other companies would produce mass-market keyboard synthesizers that included on-board sequencers (think of the Yamaha CS30 or the Casio VL-1, for instance). At this nascent moment, however, synthesizer and sequencer technology were often separate. The eight channels of the MC-8 had far more memory than competitors’ models, enough to retain up to 5,300 notes, or all the separate lines of YMO’s techno-pop songs. Phrases could either be played in from an external synthesizer connected via a cable or could be programmed in via a calculator-like keypad on the machine (cf. Carter 1997). Programming music into the MC-8 meant iteratively translating notation into numbers, a method similar to that required to program the RCA Mark II (see Figure 20.3, cf. Figure 20.1). The manual described the process parameter by parameter: instructions for how to encode pitch, then durations, then dynamics, then timbre/instrumental sounds (from whatever external synthesizer source is connected), then chords. The MC-8’s technological capability differed only nominally from the digital-analogue computing of the Mark II (punch cards versus a calculator-like keypad). YMO dealt with a programmable sequencer technology, and a resultantly parametric composing process, that strongly paralleled mid-century serial technologies and attitudes. But, simultaneously, it would be foolish not to acknowledge YMO’s radically different aesthetic results. YMO may have begun with discrete bits, parametric thinking, and iterative processes, but they arrive in the genre of techno-pop rather than multiple serialism. What gives? The answer might be as simple as loops. It’s time to state the obvious: repetition of many kinds – groove, meter, verse-chorus forms, melody, harmonic progression, and so on – is crucial to minimalism, hip hop, EDM, and vernacular genres more broadly (Middleton 1983; Julien and Levaux 2018; Fink 2005a; Butler 2014). Such repetitions are apparently antithetical to serialism of the mid-century stripe, which studiously and relentlessly
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Figure 20.3 Programming the MC 8 using numeric translations of pitch and duration at specific timepoints (for example, measures and beats or ‘steps’). Owner’s manual, p. 24
enacted the high-modernist twelve-tone orthodoxy of ever-new (Meyer 1967: 240–4). There are a few exceptions – Goeyvaerts’s tape pieces such as Nr. 4 and Nr. 5, or Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel – that prominently use looplike processes of mirroring and formal symmetry. And yet these exceptions are usually occluded or rationalised away in the commonplace, crystallised definition of orthodox serialism as described in the first paragraph of this
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chapter. We have collectively had our stock in a narrower definition of serialism, one that prioritises an aesthetic choice of high-modernist defamiliarisation, especially as created via constant non-repetition. Exploring serialism’s technical conceits as distinct from its aesthetic conceits, as in this chapter, provides an opportunity to re-evaluate that oftrepeated (but never-quite-realised) axiom: that serialism does not preclude stylistic variety (Meyer 1967: 279). The shift from modernist asceticism of the 1950s to the indulgent, repetitive grooves of the late 1970s and early 1980s was perhaps less of an inverse operation than another instantiation of the digital–analogue dialectic. Whereas mid-century serialism emphasised the digital and the discrete (with an attendant estrangement from habit, familiarity, and repetition), EDM emphasised the analogue with its obsessive repetitions and loops (even as it was made with digital technologies). Almost magically, the repetition inherent in the loop invites analogue impressions of continuity, flow, and circularity, as it simultaneously displaces our attention from the digital techniques that underlie YMO’s modular, sequencer-based techno-pop. These two poles of EDM and serialism are dialectically mediated – historically, technically, and aesthetically – by the minimalism of the 1960s and early 1970s. Minimalism is often characterised as an (over-) correction from the hard-bitten modernist serialism of the 1950s. Likewise, Philip Glass and Steve Reich engaged many of the repetitive melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic loops that would re-emerge as essential stylistic traits of EDM, hip hop, and other vernacular genres. The tape loops engineered and exploited by Terry Riley, Reich, and many others (for instance El-Dabh, Les Paul, Pauline Oliveros, King Tubby, Brian Eno, etc.) create musics fundamentally wedded to repetition. These vernacular and high-art versions of minimalism, all based on loops, are sonic parallelisms of the minimalist pop art of Andy Warhol and others. We needn’t reinforce the misperception that academic genres (serialism, minimalism) and vernacular genres (disco, EDM, hip hop) stand on opposite sides of an impenetrable high–low divide either. Robert Fink deftly shows the crosstalk between disco and minimalism, while Mark Butler develops the exchanges between EDM and academic electronic music (Fink 2005a: 29–31; Butler 2014: 21–3 and 89–93). It may be that we eventually hear such crosstalk between the serial attitudes of midcentury modernists and EDM and hip hop DJs as well. The crosstalk would draw upon the observation that there are lots of ways to get to loops. Given the technological mediation present in each of these scenarios, it’s easier to see how several generations of composers could begin with
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discrete bits, looping technology, and the question, ‘what in music is programmable?’ and arrive in completely different aesthetic spaces. Aural repetition may be deliberately attenuated in most mid-century serialism, but loops are dialectically present in serial practices in several ways: via the medieval concepts of color and talea that drove Goeyvaerts’s minimalist-serialist formal symmetries; via the tape loops of the analogue studio; via repeated bits of programmed code (imagine ‘go to’ commands) in the early computer music studio. Minimalists got to loops via tape machines and mantra practices. YMO got to loops via the program-andplay technology of the MC-8 sequencer. Hip hop producers came to loops via a huge range of technologies and techniques, such as live beat-mixing by turntablist DJs in discos and dance clubs, and by sampler and sequencer-using beat-makers (Brewster and Broughton 2006; Butler 2006, 2014). If a ‘serial attitude’ is possible at various times and places – a commitment to digitised, programmed, parametric musicking – then its apparent opposite of ‘looping’ is, seemingly, simultaneously influential in multiple scenarios. In short, the digital and the analogue continually co-exist. As a final bit of musical thinking, I’d like to dip into early hip hop and examine the way beat construction, especially using the Roland TR-808 drum machine, can exhibit a serial attitude. The Bronx in the late 1970s and early 1980s represents a socio-economic-racial milieu that is the antithesis of the Cologne WDR studio, Bell Labs, or the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center: the Bronx is the home of poor Black youth coping with generations of racism, economic exclusion, housing insecurity, insufficient education, and police violence (Chang 2005; Katz 2012; Perry 2004; Rose 2004). Early hip hop – a multifaceted art form that includes graffiti artists, DJs, producers/beat-makers, dancers, and MCs/rappers – was born of a desire for a Black-positive, Black-produced, -distributed, and consumed cultural formation that could provide at least a temporary escape from the grim slog of daily oppression. In a few crucial disco clubs in the mid-to-late 1970s, influential DJs began to foster spaces for Black identity, and often Black queer identity, to form and be validated by community, music, and dance. Amongst others, DJs such as David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Larry Levan, and Frankie Kunckles were creators of Black, queer sub-cultural spaces (cf. Lawrence 2003; Salkind 2019; Shapiro 2005). There’s much more to be said about the exchanges between disco, funk, nascent NYC house music, nascent Chicago house music, Bronx-based hip hop, and in a few more years, Detroit techno (Brewster and Broughton
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2006: 268–87). I will stick with early hip hop, though, noting that in the early 1980s producers like Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, and Marley Marl began sampling and looping ‘breaks’, the most danceable parts of disco records (Said 2013: 70–2; Schloss 2014: 36). Again, many technological paths lead here: turntablism allows for such looping, as does working with a sampler, as does working with tape. Soon hip hop producers (who were usually also turntablists) began creating beats that kept with the practice of sampling previous music but didn’t necessarily adopt long loops (sampled measures, phrases) wholesale. The hip hop techniques of chopping/sampling and synthesizing beats, which became prominent in the early 1980s, resonate with a serial attitude. I’ll have more to say about this in a moment, but first, I’d like to listen to a classic vintage hip hop track, Afrika Bambaataa and the Sonic Soul Force’s ‘Planet Rock’ (1982, original 12” version), to get a sense of how sampled and synth sounds were assembled into a groove. As the track opens, the MC fires up the crowd: ‘Party people . . .’. When the beat drops at 0:15, we hear a heavily synthesized groove cobbled together from several sounds available on the TR-808: a bass drum whomp, cowbells, and syncopated synth pings. This groove forms a foundation for the track while the MCs rap, their voices entering and leaving at various intervals. At 0:45, we hear a long melodic sample floating seemingly effortlessly over the synth-bass groove. It’s a quotation from Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans Europe Express’, sped up but transposed down, this by virtue of being replayed, probably on the Fairlight CMI in the Tommy Boy Records studio, rather than sampled from the record (Fink 2005b). The melody disappears as the MCs undertake a new verse but returns at 1:43. In combination with the heavily synthesized 808 drum sounds, the Kraftwerk sample seems to solidify the song’s forward-looking techno-futurism, as Bambaataa’s aesthetic vocabulary intertwines with a well-established AfroFuturist tradition (Eshun 1998). The song’s form, similar to YMO’s modularity, alternates between MC verses, audience participation chants (‘Rock it, don’t stop it’), the Kraftwerk sample, and other samples from Babe Ruth’s ‘The Mexican’. Also like YMO, the song builds steam by layering these elements together as the song progresses. The 4 groove, which persists throughout, takes full advantage of the 4 Roland TR-808 drum machine, which had the capability to retain thirtytwo programmable patterns over a maximum of 768 bars (Owen 2014; Reid 2004). Its sixteen preset percussion sounds (bass drum, snare, conga, cowbells, rimshot, etc.) were produced via analogue synthesizers inside the machine, not from real-life drum samples. Note that the Roland 808
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(1980–3) is still in the territory of the Mark II (1960) here, with analogue electronic production technology inside a digital interface. Its electronic presets were criticised for sounding hopelessly unrealistic and canned compared to ‘real’ drum sounds, and yet it was affordable, portable, and boasted a solidly timed on-board sequencer that made it extremely useful for programming beats. So long as one wasn’t hoping to reproduce orchestral percussion or drum sets with fidelity – and why would a hip hop producer, who expressly subverted many aspects of dominant culture, want to? – the presets of the 808 were distinctive, techno-futurist, and embraceable. Bambaataa’s mixing of an 808-produced groove, with Kraftwerk, with his crew’s distinctive MC-ing is a case in point. The modular, groove-based, technologically informed genres of EDM, techno-pop, and hip hop – though different practices in important ways – continued to cross-pollinate. Detroit techno of the 1980s drew on both hip hop and European/Japanese techno-pop such as Kraftwerk and YMO (Brewster and Broughton 2006: 340–71); artist-composers like DJ Spooky (Paul Miller) and Beth Coleman drew heavily upon both genres as they produced experimental ‘illbient’ music (a mix of hip hop, ambient, and dub) in fringe NYC clubs in the 1990s (Rodgers 2010: 81–93); the late producer and master beat-maker J Dilla’s posthumously released ‘Go Get ’Em’ (2015) sampled ‘Rap Phenomena’ from YMO’s third album BGM (1981), on which YMO first used the 808; the list goes on. ‘Great,’ you might be thinking. ‘EDM and hip hop shared many similar technologies, composing methods, and sounds.’ But what does any of this have to do with the serial attitude? The strongest connections can be made over the attempt to identify music’s smallest relevant discrete bits, as well as the technologically mediated methods of extracting, modifying, and ordering them. For hip hop beat-makers, there are essentially two methods for producing a groove: chopping/sampling and synthesizing. The method of chopping/sampling involves assembling a beat from small samples of previously recorded music, either by chopping and internally reconfiguring the sounds from one longer phrase, or assembling a beat from several different sampled sources (Schloss 2014: 106–8; Said 2013: 182–3). The second method, synthesizing, involves using a drum machine such the TR-808 to produce synthesized drum sounds, which are then assembled and looped to form the song’s foundation. In reality, the practices of chopping/sampling and synthesizing are often not mutually exclusive – a ‘canned’ synth sound from a drum machine might be modified by further processing, or a sampled sound might be mixed with a drum machine sound, distorting
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the timbre of the sample to sound more or less like an object of the producer’s imagination (cf. Said 2013: 176–92 and 454–5). The hip hop beat-maker’s intensive focus on the timbre of each drum sound – the time and effort spent refining, manipulating, and customising discrete bits – resonates strongly with the timbre obsessions demonstrated by many serial-minded electronic and computer composers (Said 2013: 133–40). There’s a connection related to order as well. For beatmakers, the function of the (sampled or synthesized) sound is determined both by its timbre and by its temporal placement in the beat. Hip hop expectations are for 4 meter, with a bass drum on beats 1 and 3, snare on beats 2 and 4, and 4 hi-hat on the ‘8ths’ when desired (Said 2013: 148–60). Beyond these most basic guidelines, however, Said offers myriad suggestions for customisation, from timbre modification (‘snares are not always actual snare-drum sounds’) to micro-timing modifications such as ‘flush’, ‘pinched-in’, ‘wrapped’, and ‘stranded’ (Said 2013: 132 and 149ff.). In short, beatmakers employ an enormous and varied customisation of both timbre and timing, and yet produce highly entrainable grooves. This is because order, drawn from a shared template of basic normative expectations, determines the sounds’ function. The atomised particles of a beat, as in other forms of serialism, need to be placed in relationship to one another to mean as music. The beat-maker’s programming, if you will, serially organises the bits within the beat structure. This programmed attitude towards order continues as producers navigate how to join loops together, transition between sections, and assemble modular elements into a formed piece (Said 2013: 166–92). Hip hop producers’ focus, all the way up the composition’s structure, on the placement of elements within the beat, measure, loop, and form shows a programmed attitude that resonates with serialism – albeit with the aim of producing clever new contexts for familiar samples, danceable breakbeats, and groove-foundations for rhymes. Despite enormous aesthetic differences, it’s striking to realise how closely such hip hop practices parallel the central conceits of modernist serialism and information theory: all three grapple with organising the bit-like abstractions that constitute a phrase’s smallest units. The analogue–digital question also resurfaces, as a stream of recorded sound is chopped up and preserved as bits in sampling practices. This is definitely the case if a digital sampler or DAW is used to organise the samples; master turntablists also chop beats using several turntables in cooperation, which preserves more of the technology and the aura of the analogue. As with the murkiness of sampled versus synthesized sound sources, though, asking whether beat-making
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practices are fully and completely digital or analogue is beside the point. It’s more productive to notice the transference between digital and analogue, between parts and whole, between bits and continuities, as hip hop producers employ a serial attitude to create beats using several different technologies.
Conclusion Having ventured quite far afield, it may be helpful to return to the definition at the beginning of this chapter, the one my students might have inferred from my teaching: that serialism is primarily about mid-century modernist acoustic music, discrete bits, order, and pattern completion. This essay has shown that every tenet of that definition is unstable, in need of redefinition and context. Acoustic composers may have begun with the question of how to organise music by discrete bits, but they immediately had to deal with secondary parameters that were not amenable to such discrete partitioning. Almost immediately, serial parameterisation was thoroughly infused by the analogue technologies of the studio, as bits were shaped into continua with volume knobs and filter-created phonetic vowel streams. Such analogue thinking did not disappear from the serial attitude in the nascent digital age. Early computers such as the Mark II wrapped a digital interface around analogue technologies, which, as Tenney discovered in using the noise generator at Bell Labs, gave more satisfying sonic results anyway. Parametric thinking like Koenig’s, Mathews’s, and Babbitt’s resonated strongly with digital technologies, but missing converters and unsatisfying synthesized sounds limited the degree to which serial music could be fully digital and still be aesthetically satisfying. The project of (serially) synthesizing timbre – a dream launched in the analogue studio and continued in MUSICn and other areas of digital computer music – needed many years and many collaborations to come to fruition. In the meantime, new digital technologies like sequencers and drum machines offered new ways to manipulate bits, patterns, and orders. Their use in vernacular genres lends a serial attitude to musics such as hip hop and EDM that are, in many important ways, distant from modernist serialism. This permissive exploration has argued that serialism is not only an aesthetic commitment held by mid-century modernist composers. The serial attitude is a way of working with musical material – especially in cooperation with technologies – that moves across and between genres.
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Serialism is not only the defamiliarised, non-repetition of matrices and musics produced in high-art academic electronic studios. The serial attitude can also be found in the modularity of techno-pop or the programmed, sampled beats of hip hop. And yet, the question of what serialism is – definitively – presses. This essay has argued that serial attitudes were shaped by technological intervention. As such, it might make sense to focus greater analytical attention on the ways that instruments, interfaces, and technologies shape musical behaviour(s). The juxtapositions from various historical and aesthetic milieux further press the definitional issue: is serialism a label for a genre (with its attendant socio-economic-racial-historical constraints), or is it a description of a process (for example, bits, order, matrices), or is it an aesthetic style (for example, non-repetition)? Music scholars will have to navigate these multiple dimensions in the way they have managed the multifaceted concept of fugue: as a genre of baroque keyboard music, as a methodology for building a piece, and as an adjective (‘fugal’) that describes imitative behaviour absent some of the other trappings. A similar situation holds for serialism. To say serialism means only the mid-century acoustic sort relies upon a reified description of genre, process, and aesthetics that is historically and socio-culturally specific. It might be more useful to remember that each of these dimensions is contingent. Mid-century serialism materialises a particular conglomeration of social, historical, institutional, and aesthetic conditions, a fact which surely needs to be highlighted in the teaching of the topic too. Likewise, there is no need to start saying that EDM and hip hop are serial musics by definition, but it becomes possible to recognise their resonances – via discrete bits, programmed orders, sequencing technologies, loops, and attempts to digitise the analogue – with a serial attitude to music making. Thinking in this way, about serial attitudes and behaviours, demands greater specificity about the socio-economic, aesthetic, and technical trappings of what is colloquially called serial music. Perhaps this technologically mediated specificity will be useful in continuing to navigate music’s digital–analogue dialectic, and in constantly reinventing a serial attitude.
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Index
absolute music, 104, 254 Acker, Dieter, 284 Adorno, Theodor, xx, 22 6, 27, 31, 73, 75 6, 79, 88 90, 100, 104 5, 214, 317, 330 2, 335 Philosophy of New Music, 22, 24, 25, 31 aesthetics, 36, 214, 289, 296, 317 Afrika Bambaataa, 360 1 Afro Futurism, 360 Agrupación Nueva Música (ANM), 270 1, 273 Ahle, Johann Rudolph, 81 Aksyuk, Sergey, 254, 255 6 aleatoricism, 146, 151, 216, 217, 233, 246, 248, 250 1, 263, 265, 277, 291, 325 8, 332 algorithm, 14, 123, 215, 219, 223, 349 50 Amy, Gilbert, 211, 214 Antiphonies, 214 Diaphonies, 214 Jeux, 214 analogue technology, 38, 340 6, 349 50, 353 4, 356 9, 361, 362 4 analytical philosophy, 17 Anhalt, István, 250 anti fascism, 16, 28, 228 aphorism, 38, 89, 90, 261 Argentine Revolution, 276 Arrau, Claudio, 274 array, 17 18, 111 19, 122 4, 132, 194, 230, 240, 286 Ars Nova, 211, 217 Association of Korean Composers, 295 Atwood, Margaret, 237 Auden, W. H., 186, 199 autobiography, 75, 79, 80, 84 automatism, 159, 176, 212, 219, 319, 337 8 autonomy, aesthetic, 104, 269 Babadjanian, Arno, 257, 261 Babbitt, Milton, xx, 18, 30, 34, 39, 43, 46, 50, 108 24, 183, 194, 198, 228, 229 31, 232 3, 235, 240, 255, 286, 321 2, 333, 340, 341, 351 3, 363 All Set, 114, 340
Ars Combinatoria, 118 Composition for Four Instruments, 108, 111 14, 122 Composition for Tenor and Six Instruments, 114 Fourth String Quartet, 118, 122 Philomel, 114, 123 Post Partitions, 114, 116 Relata I, 116 Sixth String Quartet, 119 String Quartet no. 2, 120 The Crowded Air, 123 The Head of the Bed, 119 Third String Quartet, 114, 122 Three Compositions for Piano, 108, 119, 229 Babe Ruth, 360 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 6, 40, 41, 43, 47, 76, 80, 81, 82 3, 91, 104, 151, 155, 185, 189, 195, 198, 342 Canonic Variations on ‘Vom Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her’, 189 Musical Offering, 91, 195 Backus, John, 340 Bahk, Junsang, 296 Baird, Tadeusz, 245 Balakauskas, Osvaldas, 251 Bandiera rossa, 164 Baroque, 6, 185 6, 190, 192, 198, 342, 364 Barraqué, Jean, 108, 207, 210, 211 12, 220, 223 . . . au delà du hazard, 212 Le Temps Restitué, 212 Bartók, Béla, 205, 209, 229, 241, 250 Barzun, Jacques, 259 Bauer, Marion, 108 Baumgarten, Alexander, 21 Beckwith, John, 232, 237 The Trumpets of Summer, 237 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 23, 47, 53, 58, 91, 211 Ninth Symphony, 91 Sonata op. 57, 58 Béhague, Gerard, 266, 275 Belar, Herbert, 351 Bell Labs, 344, 346, 347 51, 353, 359, 363
405
406
Index
Beneš, Juraj, 247 Benitez, Vincent, 9 Bennett, Richard Rodney, 220 Berg, Alban, xx, 38, 40, 43 4, 45, 50, 52, 86, 90, 140, 167, 198, 205, 232, 242, 247, 253, 263, 280, 286, 290, 291, 322, 336 Der Wein, 291 Lulu, xxi, 74, 80, 322 ‘Schliesse mir die Augen beide’, 73, 76, 77 Violin Concerto, 40, 44, 73, 76, 85 Wozzeck, 75 Berg, Helene, 85 Berg, Josef, 247 Berger, Arthur, 232 Berger, Roman, 247 Berio, Luciano, 16, 154 5, 158, 217 18, 318, 321, 327, 328 Alleluja, 217 Circles, 327, 334 Nones, 158, 217, 321 Requies (in memoriam Cathy Berberian), 336 Sequenze, 218, 335 Serenata, 158 Sinfonia, 336 String Quartet, 217 Tempi concertati, 327 Thema Omaggio a Joyce, 334 Bernstein, Leonard, 236, 237 Béroff, Michel, 310 Birtwistle, Harrison, 219 Bivolarević, Dimitrije, 242 Blacher, Boris, 295 Blagoy, Dimitri, 259 Blatny, Pavel, 247 Blazhkov, Igor, 257 bloc sonore, 126, 323, 324 Bokes, Vladimír, 247 Born, Sonia, 272 Bornemann, Fritz, 150 Boss, Jack, 7, 51, 72 Boulez, Pierre, xx, 11, 12, 13, 26, 27, 31 4, 43 7, 50, 57, 108, 125 39, 155, 168, 207, 210, 211, 212, 214, 216, 218, 221, 224, 231, 232, 233, 237, 295, 304, 309, 312, 316, 317 28, 329, 331, 333, 337, 338, 340, 341 Domaines, 128, 133 Don, 132 Doubles, 128, 133, 139 Éclat, 131, 133, 135, 137, 138 Figures Doubles Prismes, 133 Le Marteau sans maître, 45, 127, 130, 136, 137, 220, 322, 324
Oubli signal lapidé, 126 Pli selon pli, 125, 135, 137 Polyphonie X, 125 Répons, 139 ‘Schoenberg Is Dead’, 11, 26, 57 Sonatina, 135 Structure Ia, 14, 32 4, 45, 46, 125, 218, 223, 311, 319, 321, 322 Structure Ib, 125 Structure Ic, 125 Structures 2, 125, 128 Third Piano Sonata, 128, 133, 139, 214, 327 Božič, Darijan, 249 Brahms, Johannes, 23, 43, 123 Brinkmann, Reinhold, 59 Britten, Benjamin, xix, 51, 219 Broch, Hermann, 212 Brown, Earle, 276 Burmeister, Franz Joaquim, 81 Bussotti, Sylvano, 263, 319 Cage, John, 46, 125, 133, 218, 221, 263, 293, 295 6, 299, 314, 315, 325 6, 340, 341, 351 1958 visit to Darmstadt, 218, 314, 325 Concert for Piano and Orchestra, 221, 263 Music of Changes, 326, 340, 351 Variations I, 351 Campos, Augusto de, 136 Campos, Haroldo de, 136 candomblé, 137, 160 canon, 41, 158, 173, 176, 177 8, 184 5, 186, 188 9, 193, 197, 304, 330, 337, 355 Cardew, Cornelius, 220 Carlos, Wendy, 352 Carpenter, Patricia, 58 Carpentier, Alejo, 275 Carter, Elliott, 18, 230, 235, 323 Casella, Alfredo, 268 Castro, Eloísa García, 270 Castro, José Maria, 267, 270 Castro, Juan José, 267, 270 Catholicism, 48, 149, 214 Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), 350 censorship, 248, 251, 263 4, 289 90, 294 Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM), 277 Chan Hing yan, 287 chance, 223, 326, 327, 340, 351 changtan, 296 Chen Mingzhi, 283 Chen Qigang, 283
Index
Chen Yi, 285, 286, 288 Chin, Unsuk, 296, 298 Chopin, Frédéric, 261 Chou Wen chung, 288, 297 classical era, 34, 47, 48, 57 Clementi, Aldo, 217, 328 Informel 3, 328 Cocteau, Jean, 186, 269 Cold War, 11, 35, 224, 226, 234, 235 9, 251, 255, 258, 264, 345 Coleman, Beth, 361 collage, 221, 251, 336, 352 Cologne Studio for Electronic Music, 218, 341, 344, 346, 359 colonialism, 279, 294, 298 Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center, 230, 259, 341, 346, 350, 351, 359 combinatoriality, 17, 59, 111, 227, 283, 288, 321 compassion (Schopenhauer), 85 computer technology, 18, 219, 341, 345 6, 347 50, 353, 354, 356, 363 Conciertos de la Nueva Música (CNM), 270 1 Constantinescu, Dan, 248 construction/constructivism, 76, 89, 93, 168, 205, 246, 318, 330 as opposed to expression, 93 Copland, Aaron, 18, 225, 230 1, 232 3, 238, 268, 276 Connotations, 18 Piano Quartet, 232 Piano Variations, 232 Cordero, Roque, 274 5 Cowell, Henry, 17, 226, 227, 230 Craft, Robert, 45, 184, 186, 189, 194, 195, 198, 199, 202, 231 Crawford, Ruth, 226 Crumb, George, 284 CSOUND, 349 cubism, 87 Cultural Revolution, 282, 285 Cummings, E. E., 136 cybernetics/information theory, 215 16, 345, 347 Dahlhaus, Carl, 30 2, 104, 317, 319, 335, 339 Dallapiccola, Luigi, 18, 50, 52, 156, 206, 276 Cinque Frammenti di Saffo, 206 Il prigioniero, 52, 206 Darmstadt New Music Courses, 11 17, 29, 44, 87, 140, 155, 171, 207, 209, 210, 214, 218, 220, 233, 246, 273, 291, 295 6, 309, 314, 325, 330 Darvas, Gábor, 250
Debussy, Claude, 129, 134, 210, 211, 214, 220, 224, 279, 281 Jeux, 210 Dekker, Thomas, 197 Del Tredici, David, 235 Deleuze, Gilles, 96, 134 democracy, 29, 35, 49, 236, 237, 245, 297, 336 demystification (Weber), 23 4 Denisov, Edison, 257, 258, 260, 261, 262, 264, 265 Five Stories after Herr Keuner, 262 Italian Songs, 262 Laments, 262 Sun of the Incas, 262 Variations, 258, 261, 262 Dent, Edward, 268 Devoto, Daniel, 270 Die Musik (periodical), 79 digital technology, 38, 340, 342 51, 353, 356, 358, 359, 361, 363 disco, 355, 358 60 DJ Spooky, 361 DJing, 341, 359 Donatoni, Franco, 217 Donaueschingen Festival, 210, 314 Dubinets, Elena, 254 Durkó, Zsolt, 250 Eimert, Herbert, 12, 15, 37, 50, 100 1, 107, 141, 323, 332 Einstein, Albert, 150, 320 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 255 Eisler, Hanns, 228 Eitler, Estéban (István), 270 1, 274 El Dabh, Halim, 352, 353, 358 Leiyla and the Poet, 351 electronic dance music (EDM), xx, 341, 359, 361, 363 electronic music, 12, 15 16, 29 30, 138, 144, 146 8, 218, 230, 282, 288, 312, 341 64 Eliot, T. S., 201 Éloy, Jean Claude, 211 Enescu, George, 241, 248 Chamber Symphony, 248 Eno, Brian, 358 Estrada, Julio, 277 Evangelisti, Franco, 218, 319 Ordini, 218 experiment/experimentalism, 28, 32, 46, 217, 218, 234, 239, 244, 277, 293, 296 expressionism, 37 8, 40, 44, 53, 87, 224, 231, 242, 331
407
408
Index
Fano, Michel, 44, 207, 210, 211 12 Étude for 15 instruments, 212 Sonata for 2 Pianos, 212 fascism, 35, 49 Ferneyhough, Brian, xix, 219, 221, 293, 297, 338 Ficher, Jacobo, 267 film music, 285, 349 Fine, Irving, 232 Finney, Ross Lee, 233, 235, 236 Fišer, Luboš, 247 Fitch, Fabrice, xix, xxi Fluxus, 149, 296 Focke, Fré, 274 Focke, Ria, 274 folklorism/folk music, 40, 80, 87, 148, 163, 209, 241, 244, 249, 262, 266, 275, 290, 295, 352 formula composition (Stockhausen), 140, 153 Forte, Allen, 183, 190, 285, 287 Fraenkel, Wolfgang, 280 free atonality, 25, 91, 205, 242, 267, 280, 314, 318 freedom, xxi, 24 5, 28 30, 35, 50, 126, 147, 148, 224, 236, 244, 256, 260, 315, 325 Froidebise, Pierre, 206 Fromm, Paul, 194 Fuchs, Hanna, 79, 80 Fugellie, Daniela, 272 funk, 355, 359 Gabrieli, Giovanni, 186 gagaku, 291 Gaidelis, Julius, 250 Gandini, Gerardo, 276 Garant, Serge, 230 George, Stefan, 103, 107 Gerhard, Roberto, 51 Gershwin, George, 124 Gestalt, 143, 145, 324, 326 Gide, André, 186 Gielen, Michael, 271 Gilardi, Gilardo, 267 Ginastera, Alberto, 271, 273, 276 Second String Quartet, 276 Sinfonia porteña, 271 Glass, Philip, 358 Gliere, Reinhold, 259 Godzyatsky, Vitaly, 253, 256, 257, 258, 262 Ruptures of Flatness, 258, 261 Goehr, Alexander, 219, 284 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 93
Goeyvaerts, Karel, 12, 14, 44, 141, 207 9, 210, 214 15, 319, 331, 357, 359 Nr. 2 for 13 Instruments, 214 Nr. 3 with bowed and struck tones, 215 Nr. 4 with dead tones, 215, 357 Nr. 5 with pure tones, 215, 357 Sonata for Two Pianos, 13 14, 140, 214, 319 synthetic number, 14, 214 Golyshev, Yefim, 254 Gorbulski, Benjaminas, 250 Górecki, Henryk Mikołaj, 246 Gould, Glenn, 100, 237 Gramsci, Antonio, 154 Grandmaster Flash, 360 graphic notation, 251, 263, 328 Gredinger, Paul, 12 Gregori, Nininha, 272 Gregorian chant, 188 Griffiths, Paul, 211 Grīnblats, Romualds, 251 Grisey, Gérard, 338 Gromov, Evgeny, 262 Gropius, Manon, 80 Gropius, Walter, 80 group composition (Stockhausen), 140, 145, 146, 210, 324 Group of Atonal Composers, 242 Grupo Renovación, 267, 268, 270 Guarnieri, Camargo, 273, 276 Fifth Piano Concerto, 276 Guattari, Félix, 134 Gubaidulina, Sofia, 257, 263 Five Etudes for harp, double bass and per cussion, 263 Night in Memphis, 263 Guerra Peixe, César, 272 gugak, 294 Guo Wenjing, 285 Hába, Alois, 244, 268 haiku, 199 Halffter, Rodolfo, 275 Hambraeus, Bengt, 221 Hanson, Howard, 235 Happening, 149 Harris, Benjamin, xix Harris, Roy, 237 Hashimoto, Kunihiko, 290 Hatrík, Juraj, 247 Haubenstock Ramati, Roman, 244 Hauer, Josef Matthias, 37 8, 77, 341 Hayasaka, Fumio, 292 Haydn, Joseph, 123, 304
Index
Hegel, G. W. F., 21, 22, 24, 89, 105, 336 Heidegger, Martin, 105 Heifetz, Jascha, 280 Henze, Hans Werner, 323 Herrera, Edgardo, 276 Hertzka, Emil, 79, 90 Hill, Peter, 13 Hiller, Lejaren, 219 Hindemith, Paul, 156, 209, 229, 271, 279, 281 2, 283 Unterweisung im Tonsatz, 156, 209, 281 hip hop, xx, 341, 354, 356 64 historical necessity, 229, 248 history necessity, 27 8 Hitler, Adolf, 25, 33, 87, 205 Hofman, Srđan, 249 Holloway, Robin, xix, xxi Holocaust, 228 honkyoku, 293 Hopkins, Bill, 221, 223 En attendant, 220 Études en série, 220 Pendant, 220 Sensation, 220 Sous structures, 220 Horkheimer, Max, 22, 24 Hosokawa, Toshio, 293, 295, 299 Vertical Song I, 293 Hosono, Haruomi, 354 house music, 359 Hristić, Zoran, 249 Hrušovski, Ivan, 247 Hüber, Josef, 103 Huber, Klaus, 293, 297 Husserl, Edmund, 103 hymnody, 148, 293 I Ching, 286 Ikenouchi, Tomojirō, 294 Iliev, Konstantin, 245 illbient, 361 impressionism, 274, 291 improvisation, 152, 169, 216, 218, 221, 233, 343 Institute for Sonology, 219 International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), 268, 273, 291, 297 Internationale, The, 166 intuitive music (Stockhausen), 140, 150 Institut de recherche et de coordination acous tique/Musique (IRCAM), 139, 350 Irino, Yoshirō, 298 Concerto da Camera for Seven Instruments, 290
Ongaku, 291 isorhythm, 151, 158, 217, 337 Ištvan, Miloslav, 247 Iturriaga, Enrique, 275 Iunost’ (periodical), 260 Ivanovs, Jānis, 251 Ives, Charles, 230 J Dilla, 361 Jacobs, Paul, 264 Janáček, Leoš, 40 Japanese Society for Contemporary Music, 291 jazz, 124, 234, 240, 255, 261, 263, 354 Jež, Jakob, 249 Jia Daqun, 286 Jia Guoping, 287 Jiang Qing, 282 Jikken Kobo, 292 Johnson, Lyndon B., 255 Jone, Hildegard, 99, 105 7, 308 Joyce, James, 129, 136, 327 8, 334 Jungk, Robert, 262 Kabalevsky, Dmitri, 254 6, 259 Kafka, Franz, 317, 327 Kagel, Mauricio, 218, 271, 319, 335, 345 Anagrama, 218, 345 Antithese, 335 Staatstheater, 219 Transicíon I, 345 Kallman, Chester, 186 Kang, Sukhi, 296, 298 Nong, 296 Kant, Immanuel, 21 Kantušer, Božidar, 250 Karamanov, Alemdar, 257, 262, 263 Prologue, Idea, and Epilogue, 262, 263 Karayev, Faradzh, 265 Karetnikov, Nikolai, 257, 263 Katunda, Eunice, 273 Hommage à Schoenberg, 272 Ke Zhenghe, 279 Kelemen, Milko, 249 Keller, Hans, 52 Kennedy, John F., 255 Kern, Jerome, 124 Khachaturyan, Aram, 256, 258, 259 ‘Lyado is Sick’, 258 Khayyam, Omar, 244 Kholopov, Yuri, 260 Khrushchev, Nikita, 254, 256 Kilar, Wojciech, 246 Kim, Sun nam, 294, 297
409
410
Index
King Tubby, 358 Kinkeldey, Otto, 289 Kirchner, Leon, 235 Klangfarbenmelodie, 192 Klee, Paul, 87 Klein, Fritz, 77 9 Klumpenhouwer network theory, 96 Klusák, Jan, 247 Knoll, Sofía, 270 Knuckles, Frankie, 359 Koellreutter, Hans Joachim, 156, 274 Inventions for woodwind trio, 272 Música 1941, 272 Variations 1941, 272 Koenig, Gottfried Michael, 219, 223, 333, 344, 347, 351 Essay, 342, 344 Project 2, 347 Projekt 1, 219, 347 Sound Synthesis Program, 347 Zwei Klavierstücke, 219 Koffler, Józef, 243, 244, 268 15 Variations, 243, 268 Die Liebe, 243 Musique de ballet, 243 String Trio, 243 Symphony No. 3, 243 Kohoutek, Ctirad, 282 Koizumi, Hiroshi, 289 Kokoschka, Oskar, 82 Kolisch, Rudolph, 303 Kopelent, Marek, 247 Korean War, 294, 295 Kostić, Dušan, 249 Kraftwerk, 361 Krämer, Franz, 100 Krasner, Louis, 80 Kraus, Karl, 73 Krenek, Ernst, 18, 50, 190 1, 194, 195, 198, 205, 220, 225, 228 9, 235, 236, 269, 274 Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae, 191 Krieger, Edino, 273 Kröpfl, Francisco, 271, 276 Kubrick, Stanley, 349 Kuhn, Thomas, 31 Kurbatskaya, Svetlana, 261, 265 Kurtág, György, 250 Kurth, Ernst, 280 Lachenmann, Helmut, 287, 332, 338 Lange, Francisco Curt, 268, 271 late modernism, 43, 46 Latin American music, 136 7, 160, 266 77
Lavender Scare, 238 Le Corbusier, 12 Lee Geon Yong, 297 Lee, Shinuh, 296 Lei Liang, 288 Leibowitz, René, 11, 20, 26, 28, 50, 100, 211, 244, 269, 275, 290, 291, 320 Lendvai, Ernő, 250 Levan, Larry, 359 Lewin, David, 4, 138, 350 Study No. 1, 350 Study No. 2, 350 Lewinski, Wolf Eberhard von, 15 Ligeti, György, 22, 25 8, 29, 31, 32, 92, 139, 218, 224, 249, 295, 298, 319, 329 32, 340, 344, 345, 349 Apparitions, 330 Artikulation, 345 Atmosphères, 218, 330, 349 Continuum, 344 Lontano, 331, 349 Requiem, 331, 349 listening/perception, 28, 33 5, 139, 146, 344 5 Liszt, Franz, 336 logical empiricism, 130, 133, 236 London Sinfonietta, 51 López, Rhazés Hernández, 275 Lorca, Federico García, 163 Loriod, Yvonne, 309 10 Lu Yen, 287 Lück, Rudolf, 256, 258 9, 261, 262 Luo Zhongrong, 281 5, 298 Picking Lotus Flowers at the Riverside, 283 The Faint Fragrance, 283 Tune of the Qin, 283 Lutosławski, Witold, 246, 323, 327, 332 Musique funèbre, 323 Lutyens, Elisabeth, 108, 206, 219, 221 Chamber Concerto, 206 Motet, 206 Lyke Wake Dirge, 185 lyne, 111 18, 122 3 lyric, 88 107 Machado, Antonio, 179 Maderna, Bruno, 10 11, 12, 16, 154, 156 9, 167, 209, 218, 223, 273, 295, 319, 322, 333 Concerto per pianoforte e orchestra, 158, 217 Improvvisazione per orchestra, 158, 217 Le Rire, 217 Liriche greche, 156 Musica su due dimensioni, 217
Index
magic square, 47, 158, 217, 223 Mahler, Alma, 80, 82, 85 Mahler, Gustav, 53, 73, 85, 279, 280, 289 Maiguashca, Mesías, 276 Majerski, Tadeusz, 243 Maksimović, Rajko, 249 Malipiero, Gian Francesco, 268 Malipiero, Riccardo, 156 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 136 Mamlok, Ursula, 230 Manchester Group, 219 Mancuso, David, 359 Mao Zedong, 282 Marbe, Myriam, 248 Marguste, Anti, 257, 259 Marić, Ljubica, 249 Marley Marl, 360 Maros, Rudolf, 250 Martín, Edgardo, 275 Martino, Donald, 230, 233, 235 Martland, Steve, xix, xxi Marx, Karl, 154 Marxism, 272 mathematics, 17, 30, 50, 130, 189, 215, 235, 248 Mathews, Max, 347 50, 363 Numerology, 348 Matsudaira, Yoritsune, 291, 293, 295, 299 Etenraku, 291 Theme and Variations for Piano and Orchestra, 291 U mai, 295 Maxwell Davies, Peter, 219 May Fourth Movement, 278 Mayuzumi, Toshirō, 290, 292 Mazurek, Maria Lucia, 272 McCarthy, Joseph, 236, 238, 239 medieval music, 210, 220, 359 Meester, Louis De, 206 Merkù, Pavle, 249 Messiaen, Olivier, xix, 8 10, 12 14, 44, 46, 108, 135, 140, 151, 206 11, 212, 214, 219, 293, 309 10, 341 analysis class at Paris Conservatoire, 135, 207, 209, 211 ‘Mode de valeurs et d’intensités’, 12, 44, 46, 140, 207, 309, 341 modes of limited transposition, xix, 9, 293 Quatuor pour la fin du temps, 10 Visions de l’Amen, 309 Metzger, Heinz Klaus, 329 Meyer Eppler, Werner, 29, 344 5, 348 Michaux, Henri, 319 microtonality, 277
Milhaud, Darius, 237 Miller, Joan, 347 minimalism, 35, 52, 206, 240, 251, 265, 337, 359 Mitsukuri, Shūkichi, 289 Model Opera, 282 Mokreeva, Galina, 264 Moles, Abraham, 348 moment form (Stockhausen), 140, 147 Monteverdi, Claudio, 216, 224 Móricz, Klára, 49 Moroi, Makoto, 291 Moroi, Saburō, 288, 290 1, 294, 297, 298 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 123, 224 Mravinsky, Evgeny, 257 Murail, Tristan, 138, 338 music theatre, 277, 335 music theory, 30, 51, 235, 289 Música Viva, 271 Musical Art (periodical), 279 musical idea (Schoenberg), 57 72, 93 MUSICn, 348 50, 363 Musikblätter des Anbruch (periodical), 205 musique concrète, 210, 349, 352 musique informelle, xx, 330, 332 Nagyangch’un, 295 Nahowsky, Helene, 79 nationalism, 80, 210, 236, 237, 267, 271, 272 3, 275 6, 289 naturalness (in Soviet musical discourse), 260 Nazism, 28 9, 81, 103, 104, 224, 238 neo classicism, 40, 41, 43, 45, 190, 231, 235, 242, 243, 244, 258, 267, 269, 271, 274, 291 neo Platonism, 214 neo Romanticism, 280 neo tonal aesthetics, 239 Neue Sachlichkeit, 269 New Composer League, 291 New Music Tide (periodical), 279 Newlin, Dika, 233 Niculescu, Ştefan, 248 Nielsen, Riccardo, 156 Nikolov, Lazar, 244 5 Nilsson, Bo Mädchentotenlieder, 221 Quantitäten, 221 Zwanzig Gruppen, 221 Nixon, Richard, 255 Nobutoki, Kiyoshi, 288, 290 Noh, 292, 293
411
412
Index
Nono, Luigi, xx, 12, 16, 26, 27, 31, 47, 50, 108, 182, 207, 209, 217, 220, 223, 246, 273, 276, 295, 318, 319, 322 3 Canciones a Guiomar, 182 Canti di vita e di amore, 162 Canti per tredici, 167, 180, 322 Composizione n. 1, 158 9 Composizione per orchestra n. 2 Diario polacco ’58, 167, 180 Cori di Didone, 167, 179 Due Espressioni, 163 Epitaffi per Federico García Lorca, 164, 167, 169 Ha venido. Canciones para Silvia, 179, 180, 181 Il canto sospeso, 16, 47, 154, 167 78, 180, 209 Incontri, 167 8, 246 Intolleranza 1960, 167, 179 81 La terra e la compagna, 179 80, 217 La Victoire de Guernica, 164 Polifonica Monodia Ritmica, 162, 272 Sarà dolce tacere, 179 80, 181 Varianti, 168, 179 Variazioni Canoniche sulla serie dell’op. 41 di Arnold Schönberg, 158 Nørgård, Per, 221, 337 Northern Expedition, 279 Nuova Consonanza, 218 Obouhow, Nicolas, 254 Obradović, Aleksandar, 249 Ockeghem, Johannes, 224 October Revolution, 280 Olah, Tiberiu, 248 Oliveros, Pauline, 358 Olson, Henry, 351 Ongaku Kenkyū (periodical), 290 open form, 136, 221, 246, 327, 328 organic chromaticism, 212, 216, 321 Osterc, Slavko, 242 Ōtaguro, Motoo, 288 Ozgijan, Petar, 249 Pagh Paan, Younghi, 297 Paik, Byung Dong, 295 7 Un/Rhythme, 297 Paik, Nam June, 296, 348 Palester, Roman, 244 Sinfonietta, 244 Symphony No. 4, 244 The Vistula, 244 Varianti for 2 pianos, 246 Pan Huanglong, 287
Pan Shiji, 288 parametric thinking, xix, 207, 345, 350 1, 353, 356, 363 Park Chung Hee, 295 6, 297 Parsch, Arnošt, 247 Pärt, Arvo, 251, 257, 258, 264, 265, 337 Diagramme, 251, 263 Nekrolog, 251 Partita, 258 Symphony no. 1, ‘Polyphonic’, 258 Partido Comunista Brasileiro, 273 Pasternak, Boris, 264 Paul, Les, 358 Pavese, Cesare, 179 Paz, Juan Carlos, 267 74, 277 Dédalus, 269 Galaxias, 268 Música 1946 op. 45, 269 Passacaglia for Orchestra op. 28, 268 Primera composición dodecafónica, 267 Sonatina for Flute and Piano, 268 Transformaciones canónicas op. 49, 270 pedagogy, 43, 49 51, 258, 286 7, 289, 294 Peking opera, 287 Penderecki, Krzysztof, 139, 332 Quartetto per archi No. 1, 246 Pentland, Barbara, 233 performance, xx, 13, 109, 221, 303 16 performance art, 349 Perle, George, 50, 53, 75, 79, 229, 285, 340 phenomenology, 96, 102, 324 Philippot, Michel, 210, 211 physics, 30, 215 Pierce, John, 347, 349, 352 Five Against Sevon Random Canon, 352 Melodie, 352 Pijper, Willem, 274 Piňos, Alois, 247 Pisk, Paul, 268 Piston, Walter, 229, 235, 239 Chromatic Study on the Name of Bach, 229 pitch class set theory, 50, 94, 248, 287, 299 Planchart, Alejandro, 275 poetry, 78, 87, 91, 96 8, 99, 103, 105, 136, 169, 186, 197, 199, 200, 282 pointillism, 34, 46, 100, 128, 140, 141, 142, 247, 250, 262, 310, 324, 343 Polish School, 246, 249, 250 polystylism, 261, 265 pop art, 358 Popov, Anton, 177 post colonialism, 134, 294
Index
post modernism, 52, 206, 238, 239 post serialism, xx, 27, 34, 46, 156, 179, 317 39 Pound, Ezra, 136 Pousseur, Henri, 155, 216, 223, 319, 320 1, 329, 333, 335 6 Couleurs Croisées, 216, 336 Miroir de Votre Faust, 336 Modèle réduit, 216 Paraboles Mix, 216 Quintette à la mémoire d’Anton Webern, 216, 324 Scambi, 216 Votre Faust, 216, 336 Presley, Elvis, 349 Prieberg, Fred, 258 Pringsheim, Klaus, 279, 289 90 programmaticism, 75, 80, 169, 258, 261 progress, 22, 25, 26 8, 29, 92, 214, 251, 267 Qingzhu (Liao Shangguo), 279 Radica, Ruben, 248 radio, 15, 149, 207, 210, 219, 282, 350, 352 Radovanović, Vladan, 245, 249 Sphaeroön, 249 raga, 151 Ramovš, Primož, 249 rationalisation/rationalism, 12, 19, 23, 24, 29, 87, 297 RCA, 123, 350 1, 356 Régamey, Constantin, 244 Reich, Steve, 337, 358 Reich, Willi, 83 Reihe, Die (periodical), 11 16, 107, 207, 210, 218, 332 Reiner, Karel, 268 religion, 48, 149, 152, 293, 295 Renaissance music, 157, 178, 210, 342 rests, treatment of, 100 2, 159, 212 retention/protension (Husserl), 103 revue musicale, La (periodical), 268 rhizome, 133 4 Riegger, Wallingford, 228 Riemann, Hugo, 280 Risset, Jean Claude, 348 Ristić, Milan, 242, 249 Rochberg, George, 52 3 rock music, 354 Romanticism, 40, 57, 73 4, 87, 91, 142, 224, 232, 238, 288, 298 Rosegger, Peter, 96, 99 Roslavets, Nikolai, 254 Rosseau, Norbert, 206
Rougier, Louis, 130, 133 Rubinstein, Arthur, 280 Rudhyar, Dane, 226 Rufer, Josef, 291, 295, 298 Ruggles, Carl, 226 7, 230 Saariaho, Kaija, 338 Sacher, Paul, 197 Sakamoto, Ryuichi, 354 sampling, xx, 349, 353 4, 360 4 San, Herman van, 215 16, 223 Sanders, Paul, 268 Sang Tong (Zhu Jingqing), 280, 283, 286, 298 Night Scene, 283, 298 Sanimsky, Lazare, 268 Santoro, Cláudio, 272, 273 Pequena Toccata, 272 Sonata for Violin, 272 Sonata for Violin and Piano, 272 Śārn˙gadeva, 8 Schaeffer, Pierre, 210, 212, 352 Schenker, Heinrich, 235, 338 Scherchen, Hermann, 90, 154, 156, 164, 282 Schering, Arnold, 280 Scheuchl, Marie, 80 Schloss, Julius, 280 Schnebel, Dieter, 26, 27, 31, 218, 328 Glossolalie, 328 Schnittke, Alfred, 257, 258, 261, 262, 264, 265 Music for Chamber Orchestra, 263 Music for Piano and Chamber Orchestra, 263 Variations on a Chord, 258, 261, 262 Schoenberg, Arnold A Survivor from Warsaw, 209 Drei Lieder op. 48, 72 Erwartung, 38 First String Quartet op. 7, 91 Five Pieces for Piano op. 23, 4, 8 Fourth String Quartet, 283 Moses und Aron, 41, 67, 72, 206 Ode to Napoleon, 44, 46, 209, 322 Piano Piece op.33a, 46, 59, 72 Pierrot lunaire, 38, 279 Serenade op. 24, 4, 8, 154 Suite for Piano op. 25, 4, 33, 41, 59 65, 77, 205, 269 Third String Quartet, 245 Variations for Orchestra, 41, 209 Von Heute auf Morgen, 41 Wind Quintet op. 26, 41, 268, 269 Schoenberg, Nuria, 209
413
414
Index
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 85 Schubert, Franz, 88, 100, 171, 336 Schuller, Gunther, 234 Schumann, Robert, 336 Schütz, Heinrich, 186 Schwantner, Joseph, 240 science/scientism, 28, 31, 35, 234 5, 238, 338 Scriabin, Alexander, 279, 288 Seiber, Mátyás, 250 Serocki, Kazimierz, 245 6 Sessions, Roger, 18, 231, 233, 235 Solo Violin Sonata, 18 sexuality, 149, 238 Shakespeare, William, 237 Shanghai Conservatory of Music (SCM), 279 81 Shannon, Claude, 344 Shapero, Harold, 235 Shapey, Ralph, 230, 240 Shibata, Minao, 290 1 Shneerson, Grigory, 263, 281 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 51, 257, 262 Aphorisms, 257 Seven Verses of Alexander Blok op. 127, 262 Viola Sonata op. 147, 262 Violin Concerto no. 2 op. 129, 262 Siano, Nicky, 359 Sibelius, Jean, 40 silence, 99 103, 148 Sink, Kuldar, 251 Sino Japanese War (First), 293 Sino Japanese War (Second), 279 Šivic, Pavel, 242, 249 Twelve Tone Studies in Form of a Little Piano Suite, 242 Škerjanc, Lucijan Marija, 249 Škerl, Dane, 249 Slonimsky, Nicolas, 268 Smith Brindle, Reginald, 50, 318 19 Smith, Hale, 234 smooth/striated (Boulez), 137, 326 7 socialism, 29, 281 socialist realism, 28, 35, 236, 254, 265, 273 Somers, Harry, 237 sonata form, 44, 57, 67, 109 sonorism, 246, 249, 250, 252, 332 Southam, Ann, 240 Souvtchinsky, Pyotr, 137 Sovietskaya Muzyka (periodical), 281 space, 9, 34, 91 3, 137, 138, 141, 145, 147, 292 spectralism, 35, 52, 138, 206, 265, 277, 298, 338 Spies, Claudio, 4, 194, 198, 202 Sposobin, Igor Vladimirovich, 282
Spranger, Eduard, 280 Srebotnjak, Alojz, 249 Stadlen, Peter, 102, 303 9 Stajić, Petar, 242 Stalin, Joseph, 28, 245 statistical form, 140, 146 7, 171, 210, 325, 326 7, 331, 344 Stein, Erwin, 205 Steiner, Karl, 280 Steuermann, Eduard, 89, 303 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 11 15, 29, 31 4, 44 6, 50, 102, 108, 133, 136, 140 54, 167 72, 207 10, 214 16, 218 23, 262, 277, 295 6, 311 14, 318 20, 321 9, 331 2, 333 6, 340, 341, 342 5, 357 Cosmic Pulses, 147 Der Jahreslauf, 153 Dienstag aus Licht, 147 Freitag aus Licht, 147 Gesang der Jünglinge, 147, 171, 321, 334, 343 Gruppen, 45, 143, 145, 214, 324, 326 Hymnen, 147, 148, 335 Inori, 151, 335 Klang, 140, 147, 153 Klavierstück I, 141, 262, 312 Klavierstück II, 141, 262, 312 Klavierstück III, 141, 144, 262, 312 Klavierstück IV, 141, 262, 312 Klavierstück V, 262, 312 Klavierstück VI, 262, 312 Klavierstück VII, 262, 312 Klavierstück VIII, 312 Klavierstück IX, 312 Klavierstück X, 312, 313 Klavierstück XI, 147, 221, 314, 315, 327 Kontakte, 147, 313 Kontra Punkte, 29, 141, 144, 215, 322 Kreuzspiel, 14, 45, 140 1, 144, 340, 357 Kurzwellen, 148, 328 Licht, 147, 150 3, 313, 336 Mantra, 151, 321 Momente, 147 Paradies, 153 Plus Minus, 148 Prozession, 148, 328 Punkte, 141 Schlagquartett, 141 Sirius, 147, 151, 153 Solo, 148 Spiel, 141 Spiral, 148 Sternklang, 153 Studie I, 141, 145
Index
Studie II, 141, 342 Telemusik, 147, 148 Tierkreis, 153 Zeitmasze, 146, 326 Storm, Theodor, 78 Stravinsky, Igor, xx, 18, 41, 45 6, 183 202, 209 10, 220, 231 3, 236, 262, 263, 279, 288, 292, 295, 321 A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer, 197 8 Abraham and Isaac, 200 Agon, 190, 193, 198, 232 Cantata, 198 Canticum Sacrum ad honorem Sancti Marci nominis, 188 9, 193 Concertino, 184 Concertino for 12 Instruments, 184 Elegy for J.F.K., 186, 199 201 Firebird, 183, 186 Histoire du soldat, 186 In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, 183 4, 186 8, 198 Introitus T.S. Eliot in memoriam, 199, 201 Movements for Piano and Orchestra, 197 Octet, 186 Oedipus Rex, 186 Pérsephone, 183 Requiem Canticles, 202 Rite of Spring, 197, 199, 210 Septet, 185 6 The Card Game, 41 The Fairy’s Kiss, 41 The Rake’s Progress, 186 Three Songs from William Shakespeare, 184, 321 Threni id est lamentationes Jeremiae pro phetae, 193 7, 232 Variations Aldous Huxley in memoriam, 198 9 Stravinsky, Vera de Bosset, 184 Studio di Fonologia, 218 Štuhec, Igor, 249 style, 48, 91, 320, 331 2, 339, 364 Sugata, Isotarō, 290 Švara, Danilo, 249 Sviridov, Georgi, 257, 259 Little Toccata, 259 Sylvestrov, Valentyn, 253, 255, 257 60, 261, 263 5 Five Pieces, 264 Projections, 263 Triad, 258, 264 symmetry, 42, 58 72, 93, 98, 207, 214, 227, 231, 270, 286 7, 357
Szabelski, Bolesław, 246 Székely, Endre, 250 Szervánszky, Endre, 250 Szokolay, Sándor, 250 Szőllősy, András, 250 Szymanowski, Karol, 241 Taiji Composition System, 286 Takahashi, Yukihiro, 354 Takemitsu, Tōru, 284, 292 Piano Distance, 293 Hika, 293 Le Son Calligraphié I, 293 Maque, 293 Pause Interrompue, 293 Requiem for Strings, 292 Ring, 293 Sacrifice, 293 tāla, 8, 151 Talma, Louise, 232 3 Tan Dun, 284 5 Tan Xiaolin, 281 Tang Daqu, 286 Tarakanov, Mikhail, 260 Taruskin, Richard, 11, 48 9, 74, 104, 340 Tcherepnin, Alexander, 280 techno, 359, 361 Technopolis (Yellow Magic Orchestra), 354 5 temporality, 9, 92, 96, 103, 121 2, 126, 130, 135 8, 141, 146, 153, 175 6, 292, 326, 327 Tenney, James, 348 50, 353, 363 Analog #1 (Noise Study), 348 Collage #1 (‘Blue Suede’), 349 Music for Player Piano, 353 text compositions, 149 Thaw, The, 245 Third Stream, 234 Thomas, Dylan, 186 8 Thomson, Virgil, 237 tintinnabuli, 265 Tito, Josip Broz, 243 Toda, Kunio, 290 Togni, Camillo, 157 Serenata, 206 Tonus, 271, 273 4 Toop, Richard, 207, 212, 328, 332, 334 totalitarianism, 25, 48 9, 236, 238, 241, 289 tradition, 9, 33, 41, 49, 51, 57, 72, 87, 109, 124, 148, 251, 267, 296, 298, 333 Tudor, David, 293, 315 Tzeng Shing Kwei, 287
415
416
Index
ultramodernism, 17, 225 7, 230 unity/organicism, 3, 28, 32 3, 49, 92, 105, 185, 219, 233, 287 Universal Edition, 79, 89 universalism, 19, 148, 150, 153, 197, 241, 267, 337 university, serialism in, 17, 226, 230, 234 5 Un Yung La, 294, 298 Six Preludes for Piano, 294 Vanegas, Marco Aurelio, 276 Varèse, Edgard, 101, 288 variation, 23, 92 6, 105, 130, 133 developing, 43, 44, 91 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 40, 219 Verdi, Giuseppe, 206, 253 Vieru, Anatol, 248 Vietnam War, 149, 296 Villa Lobos, Heitor, 273 Viotti, Lavinia, 272 Vlad, Roman, 190, 198 Volkonsky, Andrey, 254, 257 9, 262, 264 Laments of Shchaza, 262 Musica Stricta, 254, 257 9 Suite of Mirrors, 262 Vostrák, Zbynek, 247 Vustin, Alexander, 265 Wagner, Richard, 23, 73, 84 5, 336 Parsifal, 85 Wang Xilin, 283 Warhol, Andy, 358 Warsaw Autumn, 245, 247, 263 Weber, Ben, 233 Weber, Carl Maria von, 108 Weber, Max, 22 4 Webern, Anton, xix xx, 10 12, 15, 26, 38, 42 7, 48 9, 50, 52, 74, 75, 87 107, 108, 111, 124, 140, 142 3, 151, 154, 184, 188 9, 193, 195 7, 198, 206 7, 209, 214, 216, 220, 224, 230, 231 2, 233, 243, 247, 253, 258, 261, 270, 274, 286, 287, 292, 303 9, 310, 321, 324 5, 335 6, 342 Cantata I op. 29, 99, 105 Cantata II op. 31, 99 Concerto for Nine Instruments op. 24, 43, 142, 253 Das Augenlicht op. 26, 99 ‘Dein Leib geht jetzt der Erde zu’ M. 276, 99 Five Pieces for Orchestra op. 10, 89 fragment for string trio M. 273, 93, 99 Kinderstück M. 267, 93 ‘Mein Weg geht jetzt vorüber’ op. 15/4, 96 Piano Variations op. 27, 46, 100, 102, 261, 270 Quartet op. 22, 42, 184, 325
Six Bagatelles op. 9, 89 String Quartet op. 28, 102, 104, 287, 308 String Trio op. 20, 42 Symphony op. 21, 42, 99, 102, 103, 270, 287 Three Little Pieces for Violoncello and Piano op. 11, 96 Three Songs from ‘Viae inviae’ op. 23, 99 Three Songs op. 25, 99 Wedekind, Frank, 73 Weinzweig, John, 229, 233 4, 235 Weiss, Adolph, 228 Wellesz, Egon, 268, 289 Welsch, Wolfgang, 21 Wen Deqing, 287 Westdeutscher Rundfunk, 15 Westergaard, Peter, 230 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 206 Wolff, Christian, 325 Wolpe, Stefan, 228 Wörner, Karl H., 220 Wundt, Wilhelm, 280 Wuorinen, Charles, 230, 232 3 Wuxing, 286 Xenakis, Iannis, 219, 276, 326, 329, 331, 340 Pithoprakta, 331 Xiao Shuxian, 282 Xiao Youmei, 279 Xu Shuya, 285 Yamada, Kōsaku, 288 Yekimovsky, Viktor, 265 Yellow Magic Orchestra, 354 9, 360, 361 Yuasa, Jōji, 291 2, 296, 299 Projection for Seven Players, 292 Yudina, Maria, 259 Yun, Isang, 293, 294, 296, 299 Loyang, 295 Music for Seven Instruments, 295 Om mani padme hum, 295 Réak, 295 Zahortsev, Volodymyr, 257 Zenk, Ludwig, 107 Zero Hour (Stunde Null), 10 11, 224, 226 Zhao Xiaosheng, 286 Zhdanov, Andrei, 273, 281 Zheng Yinglie, 286 Zhou Long, 288 Zhu Jian’er, 283 Zimmermann, Bernd Alois, 218 Zwilich, Ellen Taaffe, 235