Serialism: Encyclopedia II - Serialism - History of serial music

Serialism - History of serial music

The serialization of rhythm, dynamics etc developed after the Second World War by arguing that the twelve-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers of the Second Viennese School had serialized pitch, and was partly fostered by the work of Olivier Messiaen and his analysis students, including Karel Goeyvaerts and Boulez, in post-war Paris. Twelve-tone music is regarded by some as a sub-category of serialism, and by others serialism is seen as an outgrowth of twelve-tone music.

Serialism - Twelve tone music

In the early 20th century composers in the european classical tradition began searching for other ways to organize works of music other than reliance on the ordered system of chords and intervals known as tonality. Many composers used modal organization, and others began to use alternate scales within a tonal context provided by jazz. There was an increasing movement to avoid any particular chord as being central, which was described as atonal or pantonal. Composers seeking to extend this direction in music began to search for ways to compose systematically.

Just after the First World War, Schoenberg began writing pieces with 12-note motives and using a procedure to "work with the notes of the motive". He analogized this process to the contrapunctal rules of Bach, arguing that as Bach's rules produced tonality without referencing it, so his rules produced a new basic means of structuring music which was not yet understood. It is for this reason that Schoenberg is often referred to as the "founder" or creator of serialism.

While Schoenberg was concerned with the serial ordering of pitch, his student Anton Webern began to relate other aspects of music to the basic row.

The politics of Nazi Germany intruded into the development of the musical idea. With the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the implementation of "race laws" with regard to ownership, culture and employment, many of the main composers of 12-note music were placed on a list of Entartete musik ('Degenerate Music'), the Nazi term for all music that they disapproved of. There were two reasons, one was simply the nature of the composers as "Jewish", the other was the Nazi ideas of art as part of the propaganda arm of the state. Avant-garde forms of art were thus banned, even if the artist was a political adherent of Nazism. With this regime's rise, Arnold Schoenberg was obliged to emigrate, eventually to America in 1933, and his works and those of his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern were banned.

Serialism - Serialism invented and described

The period after World War II represents the codification of serialism as a body of theory. Most of the major concepts were named, refined, and a series of notational conventions were developed in order to deal with the particular problems of serial composition.

After the Second World War, students of Oliver Messiaen saw Webern's structure, and Messiaen's techniques of parameterization as the next way forward in composition. They began creating individual sets or series for each element of music. The elements thus serially determined included the duration of notes, their dynamics, their orchestration, and many others. They created the term serialism to describe what they were doing, and argued that the Twelve Tone works of Webern, Schoenberg and others were also "serial" works. To differentiate 12 tone works from those with other forms of parameterization, the term "multiple serialism" was used, and if all parameters were serially controlled total serialism. Because of the Nazi repression, some young composers took serialism to be the advancing the cause of Anti-fascism. These included Stockhausen and Boulez. Réné Leibowitz, as composer, conductor, teacher and author was also influential in claiming the Second Viennese School as being the foundation for modern music. From these figures emerged two influential schools, the School of Paris around Pierre Boulez and a German school around Stockhausen.

Schoenberg's arrival in the US in 1933 helped accelerate the acceptance of both twelve tone music, and serialism more generally in American academia, at that time dominated by neo-classicism, though he himself felt his ideas were being discounted. Even before his death in 1951 two major theorists and composers, Milton Babbitt and George Perle, emerged as prominent figures actively involved with the analysis of serial music as well the creation of new works using sometimes radical extensions and revisions of the method. In many cases older composers were influenced to adopt tone rows or other serial procedures by their students, for example, Roger Sessions began to incorporate them in 1952, influenced by Milton Babbitt who was his student.

In the late 1950's Allen Forte began working on ways to describe atonal harmony, and to combine the methods of Heinrich Schenker, who was an ardent opponent of such music, with the developments in what was then contemporary music. He made extensive use of set notation, pitch classes and families and other terms which would later become standard in the description of serial composition. For example in 1964 he published an article entilted "A Theory of Set-Complexes for Music". In 1973 he published the very influential work The Structure of Atonal Music.

Serialism - Serialism and high modernism

Serialism, along with John Cage's aleatoric music, was enormously influential in post-War music. Theorists such as George Perle codified serial systems, and his 1962 text Serial Composition and Atonality became a standard work on the origins of serial composition in the work of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. Declaring itself "revolutionary" and "a new tonality", serialism created an environment where experimentation with sound, in a manner similar to the exploration of pure painting in Abstract Expressionism was at the forefront of composition, which led to increased use of electronics and other applications of mathematical notation to composition, developed by theorists such as the composer and mathematician Milton Babbitt.

Other composers to use serialism include Luigi Nono, who developed similar ideas separately, Roger Reynolds, and Charles Wuorinen, the later works of Igor Stravinsky and the early works of George Rochberg. Major centers for serialism were the Darmstadt School and the "School of Paris" centered around Pierre Boulez.

Igor Stravinsky's adoption of serial techniques offers an example of the level of influence that serialism had after the Second World War. Previously Stravinsky had used series of notes without rythmic or harmonic implications (Shatzkin: "A Pre-Canticle Serialism in Stravinsky" 1977). Because many of the basic techniques of serial compositon have analogs in traditional counterpoint, uses of inversion, retrogarde and retrograde inversion from before the war are not necessarily indicative of Stravinsky adopting Schoenbergian techniques. However with his meeting Robert Craft and acquaintance with younger composers, Stravinsky began to consciously study Schoenberg's music, as well as the music of Webern and later composers, and began to use the techniques in his own work, using, for example, serial techniques applied to fewer than 12 notes. Over the course of the 1950's he used procedures related to Messiaen, Webern and Berg. While it is difficult to label each and every work as "serial" in the strict definition, every major work of the period has clear uses and references to its ideas.

During this period Serialism's influence cut in two diections. As with the definition of Sonata form and tonality, one of the major intellectual projects was in analyzing previous works in the light of serial techniques, for example finding use of rows in previous composers going back to Mozart. The other was the use of serial forms of analysis and structuring of compositions even by composers who were not using a row or a series as the means of structuring a work. The use of set theory, classes and parameterization is found in the post-war works of Elliott Carter, Witold Lutoslawski and even farther afield to essentially tonal composers such as Alwyn, Shostakovich and Britten.

Serialism - Serialism in the present

Serialism - Reactions to and against serialism

Serialism never found wide favour with classical-music audiences, even though many composers adopted it in various forms. It is no exaggeration to say that it became, in theory at least, the favored means of expression for High modernism beginning around 1950, and for the next two or three decades it continued to be regarded, predominantly in the musical academia of the USA and Germany, as the most important principle of musical construction. Some theorized that it would provide the basis for integration of electronic music and aleatoric music; though in fact the latter, making recourse to chance procedures, evolved partly as a reaction against the over-controlled nature of Total Serialism. The various reactions against Serialism became matters of controversy in musical circles, helping to produce such movements as Minimalism (music) and Neo-Romanticism.

Part of the reason for the centrality of serialism in the debate over the meaning and direction of concert music is that it was far from alone in an attempt to systematize music, and root music theory in the modern age. At the same time that Schoenberg was working on his pantonal ideas, other experimental composers were attempting to define harmony in terms of fundamental and measurable qualities, such as rhythm. This attempt to found music on a more axiomic and rigorous basis formed the background for the introduction of the theories of the late 1940's and early 1950's. It was argued that serial music raised each note to specificity, an effect called pointalistic in analogy with the painting of Seurat.

The debate was often decidedly uncollegial: serial and other forms of avant garde music were condemned as being "not music", while proponents such as Pierre Boulez argued that "music exists in the avant garde or not at all". In the words of Roger Scruton (1997), "the order that exists in [serial compositions] is not an order that can be heard, when we hear the sounds as music." Academic departments often became battlegrounds, with professors trying to tilt the balance one direction or another. Ideologies formed around what constituted progress in music, and the history of music was retold, from different viewpoints, either to support the inevitability of serialism, or conversely to ground tonality in immutable realities.

Serialism also spawned a host of other attempts to incorporate process into music, including aleatory, or chance, music, and graphical notations which provided for wide ranging improvisation on the part of musicians. This might seem counter-intuitive given the assertion by may serial composers that serialism was about control over more and more of the score, but, in fact, it arose out of the desires for greater variety and texture to music, as expressed in the arguments in the 1950's over Total Serialism.

Within the community of modern music, exactly what constituted serialism was also a matter of debate. The wide conventional usage, is that the world "serial" music applies to all 12 tone music, which is a "subset" of serial music, and it is this usage that is generally intended in reference works. However, many practitioners, including Roger Sessions and Allen Forte argued that serialism was an historic outgrowth of a search for a new tonality, and that both were subsets of this wider search. Other practitioners of serial music argued that individual elements should not be under serial control, but instead under some form of stochastic patterning, or that the large scale of the composition should be under serial control, but individual events at the selection of the composer, or the performer.

Serialism, because of its focus on process would give birth to process musics, for example of John Cage and the early Steve Reich works such as Drumming. Some process music would retain the concern for the "liberation of dissonance" that Schoenberg declared to be essential, while other composers would select largely consonant, or non-functionally dissonant materials.

Jazz artists in the middle of the 20th century began to work with serial and 12 tone techniques to expand the pallette of jazz music. Most of these attempts were of the compositional nature such as composer-pianist Bill Evans who wrote tunes like "12 Tone Tune". More recently you have to works of American guitarist Bruce Arnold who composes and improvises with 12 tone and serial techniques.

Even 75 years after its creation (or 55, depending on which version of history one subscribes to), serial music maintains its aura of being "difficult" and archtypically "modern". Critics routinely fall into stances which praise or condemn it as a category, and works composed using serial techniques are considered "daring" programming choices. However, for every assertion of uniqueness, there are also critics that argue that fundamentally the much of the music is "very late Romanticism" raised to a very high level, and that it should be played with the same eye to harmonic richness and musical aesthetic.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History of serial music", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki