9/11/2023 0 Comments Serialism![]() ![]() Maybe that’s one definition of beauty, some elusive ratio between the time spent experiencing a piece of music and the time pondering its absence.Īlban Berg, “Verwandlungsmusik” from “Lulu,” Act IĪccording to the composer Gérard Grisey, both a fervent critic and sly admirer of the serialists, especially Pierre Boulez, twelve-tone music music made the frequent mistake of trying to cram too much sound and contrast into too little time, overloading the brain and making the dramaturgy of the pieces one big, gray mush. The movement lasts just over a minute in real time, but resonates long after. In this game of tension and release, the release is barely palpable-but it’s there. The two instruments play a close, dissonant minor second that resolves into a minor third for the briefest of instances. A few bars later, the cello joins the viola in its high melodic register. A melodic major second opens the movement with a swell, as if hoping to unfold into an endless melody it can’t find the stamina to continue. This gorgeous, introspective fifth movement is full of allusions to Wagnerian (even Straussian) excess, tempered by extreme reduction and modesty. 36įew sounds summon hazy Romantic mystery quite as quickly as muted strings, the timbre that opens the fifth movement of Webern’s six-movement work for string quartet (lasting barely five minutes in total). In this playlist, I’ve gathered eight unambiguously gorgeous serialist works.Īrnold Schoenberg: Violin Concerto Op. But many galant-style compositions are terrible, too. Of course, many serialist compositions are terrible. More to the point, it’s simply false that serial music has “nothing of beauty, sequence, or proportion” (or that those are the only things that matter, but that’s a whole other can of worms). Even if you buy the premise that all serial music is ugly, its reign was neither as long nor as brutal as you’d think from the fact that we’re dissing the genre in 2022. In any case, by 1968, Stockhausen had composed his prettily new-age “Stimmung” for six voices in simple overtone proportions, and Boulez was conducting “Parsifal” at Bayreuth. For the record, I believe this, in the cases of Stockhausen and Boulez, had at least as much to do with their undoubted charisma and deep psychosexual need for veneration and power as it did with their tone-row methodology. In fact, the serialists did dominate the musical scene in the 1950s and early 1960s, with longer tails in musical academia. (John Adams, who studied composition in the 1970s and is probably the most performed American classical composer, still styles himself as a brave rebel against the excesses of European-style serialist pretension.) ” Citing two recent books, McWhorter argues, among other things, that serialist or twelve-tone music offers “nothing of beauty, sequence, or proportion.” He adds that after listening to a work by Luciano Berio, “I felt…forced to at least entertain the possibility that classical music had nowhere to go but ugly after a certain point.”įollow the debate on contemporary classical music today, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the most prominent serialists-especially the post-World War II composers Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen-have had a chokehold on our collective musical imagination for centuries. Like some others on the 300-million-headed-hydra of hysteria known as Twitter, I was mildly irked on April 26 when the Columbia University linguist and New York Times op-ed writer John McWhorter published an essay titled “ Classical Music Doesn’t Have to be Ugly to be Good. ![]()
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