Category: Articles

Is Serialism Still Relevant? Donald Erb



Donald Erb
Photo by Janet Century, courtesy the Theodore Presser Company

No one could have had a more complete exposure to serialism than I did as a student of Marcel Dick. Marcel was a student of Schoenberg who played viola in the Kolisch Quartet, and often performed the music of Schoenberg and Webern as part of the musical scene in Vienna. Marcel was an amazing source of musical knowledge, but I balked at the dictatorial quality of serialism.

For me, a statement I made back in 1969 still holds:

“…composing is basically an intuitive process. A composer should be able to use what he knows about music in an instinctive manner rather than relying on systems.”

Although serial music was thought of by Marcel and other Central European composers as the logical music to follow the Romantics, as the music became more and more cerebral it resulted in a disconnectedness from the audience and the performers. Other, more accessible styles of writing made advances with the public. Serialism will always be of historical interest and there will always be performances of Pierrot Lunaire, but the movement as a whole has long been dead.

Is Serialism Still Relevant? Dan Welcher



Dan Welcher
Photo courtesy the Theodore Presser Company

Like most US-trained composers my age, I was “forced” to learn serialism in graduate school. And, like most of my colleagues, I was also told that this was the only way to be taken seriously as a composer (this was in the early seventies). But unlike many of my friends, I didn’t totally abandon the technique when I finally found the nerve to reclaim tonality, some time during the early 1980s. In fact, I merely allowed my compositional technique to admit tonality as another tool, one that could be used both alongside or in place of serialism.

For me, serialism is a very useful tool; it’s just not the only tool. I use the technique to organize materials when it suits the work being composed, but not usually for the entire piece. Just yesterday, I was present at a recording session of my new work for wind ensemble, Songs Without Words, by the excellent North Texas Wind Symphony. When the first movement, “Manic,” was in the can, I asked the dozen-or-so young band conductors in the control room if any of them had realized that this entire movement was a strict twelve-tone piece, following all the rules. Not one of them had, despite the rather obvious (to me) statement, re-statement, and block triadic statement of the row in its original form throughout this very brief movement. “It can’t be serial,” one of them had the nerve to say, “it has such normal phrasing!”

No one ever said that serial, or twelve-tone music, had to be devoid of all the elements we come to prize in music: implied harmonic underpinnings are not foreign to the technique at all, and bass lines can define a sort of tonality that flies in the face of the “every note for himself” school of composition. Dallapiccola showed me how this can actually create a harmonic language that heightened expressivity, by releasing new and unexpected chords into the air, or by helping to “spin” the inner mechanical underpinnings of a theme. Stravinsky found ways of serializing his already very sparse note-choosing to make it even more compact, and I absorbed this, too. And Britten, dismissed in the seventies as hopelessly reactionary, proved in his Turn of the Screw that twelve-tone organizational principals could even apply to the key relationships of various scenes (there are twelve) in a two-hour-long opera.

Far from being a hindrance, or an outmoded strait jacket, serialism is a very useful and still valid tool for composers. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if hip-hop discovered it soon!

Temperament: The Idea that Solved Music’s Greatest Riddle



An excerpt from the book by Stuart M. Isacoff. Reproduced here courtesy of the author and Alfred A Knopf, publisher.

Read an interview with Author Stuart Isacoff

Chapter 14: Coda

Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently
rising, freshly exuding,
Scooting obliquely high and low.
—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

The change was gradual. Mean-tone tuning continued to be used on many organs throughout the nineteenth century; for acoustical reasons, equal temperament’s impure thirds sound much coarser on organ pipes than they do on piano strings. And piano technicians continued to face practical difficulties in achieving an equal division of the octave; there were some who still found it undesirable.

In truth, equal temperament is actually impossible to attain even on today’s pianos. A modern piano’s strings are in a condition of permanent out-of-tuneness known as inharmonicity. Such factors as stiffness, width, temperature, humidity and rust all exert an influence in this direction; a further complication arises from the fact that the various materials used in the construction of musical instruments each contribute different resonating properties. All these stand in the way of a perfect tuning. Indeed, inside a contemporary grand piano there are places where a single hammer strikes two or three strings simultaneously in order to amplify the sound of a single tone, and those paired strings never produce a true unison—the sound is fuller, and more characteristic of a piano, when they don’t.

Nevertheless, with Rameau’s help, the temperament wars, after centuries of struggle, had essentially reached an end. Despite the technical challenges that remained, equal temperament settled in as the philosophical ideal. And it made all the difference in the world.

Over the next centuries, Beethoven and Schubert, Liszt and Chopin continued to dissolve the limits of musical form, producing art that would not have been possible with any other tuning. At the turn of the twentieth century, impressionists and expressionists took advantage of equal temperament’s harmonic pliancy, painting musical portraits free of references to a particular tonal center. By 1923 Arnold Schoenberg began using his twelve-tone system of composition with the aim of eliminating the distinction between consonance and dissonance altogether. Schoenberg put an end to the very idea of natural law in music. Each tone in his system became an equal entity governed only by the hierarchy imposed by an individual composer.


The Steinway overstrung piano
Photo Credit: Steinway & Sons

The piano evolved and proliferated. By the mid–nineteenth century, there were more than three hundred piano makers in England alone. In 1868, Paris boasted more than twenty thousand piano teachers. Soon, the piano craze spread to other regions of the world—brought by covered wagons to log cabins on America’s western frontier, and by camels to Arabia. As the twentieth century began, Americans were buying more than 350,000 pianos a year. And they were all tuned, more or less, in equal temperament.

Iron frames replaced wooden ones, creating a more brilliant instrument, and this was followed by other innovations. In the United States, Steinway & Sons introduced the overstrung square piano in 1855 (a new, more practical design in which the bass strings cross over the treble), and in 1859, the overstrung grand. Within years, this single piano maker would garner more than 120 patents for changes and improvements to the old designs, creating an instrument with a power and nuance unimagined in the eighteenth century.

Today’s piano is a miraculous machine: a colossus of cast iron and wood—filled with screws, hammers, and felt—weighing nearly a thousand pounds. Its frame sustains twenty-two tons of tension exerted on its strings—the equivalent of twenty medium-sized cars. Yet it can respond to the slightest whisper of a pianist’s touch, producing a sound as warm and caressing as the human voice. Concertgoers the world over still flock to hear its magical sounds, unaware of the long controversy that once brewed over the way its tones are arranged, in twelve equal steps within each octave. For most, the idea that they might be formulated another way has simply never arisen.

Yet the temperament debate never completely disappeared. Even in the twenty-first century, a sense of intrigue and excitement over the ancient tunings keeps the topic burning with partisan heat. It is particularly fertile ground for early-music specialists, of course. But there is also plenty of action in other quarters.

Musicologist Ernest G. McClain, in books such as The Myth of Invariance, probes what he sees as hidden musical meanings in the texts of the world’s religions, from the Rig-Veda and the Egyptian Book of the Dead to the Book of Revelation. McClain, in his retirement years, invests a tremendous amount of time and effort pursuing what he calls “Davidic musicology” (named for the biblical David). “It’s a little astonishing to attribute temperament theory to someone who lived in 1000 b.c.e.,” he admits. But he cites evidence in the Bible, in the Sumerian Kings list, and in Babylonian legend of a very early awareness of the mathematical calculations used for a range of musical proportions. “The oldest stories we have of gods and heroes are really about music,” he says.

Contemporary composers who place temperament at the core of their work include Lou Harrison—who has employed the mean-tone tunings of Johann Philipp Kirnberger, a student of Bach who was decidedly against equal temperament—and distinguished composer and scholar Easley Blackwood, a longtime professor at the University of Chicago. Blackwood has written music using a variety of equal temperaments, dividing the octave up into from thirteen to twenty-four slices. These “microtonal” works are stunningly strange—sometimes edgy and dark, at other times brightly boisterous, often haunting and otherworldly.

A flourishing circle of just-intonation advocates with ties to Eastern mysticism includes clusters of adherents in New York and California. One is W. A. Mathieu, whose mammoth book Harmonic Experience explores music’s inner workings and its resonance with human experience. Mathieu, who first became known as a jazz musician, studied with Blackwood, whom he credits with imparting important mathematical insights into the nature of temperament. “Then I heard Northern Indian music,” he relates, “and found in it a kind of purity that I longed for but couldn’t achieve or understand.” He studied under Indian master musician Pandit Pran Nath, became friends with innovative composer Terry Riley, and developed his own approach to the similarities and differences between pure and equal-tempered tunings.

“Each one is a complete universe unto itself,” he explains, “but they own mutual territory. Equal temperament is not a substitute for just intonation, just as adulthood is not a substitute for childhood. You could say that just intonation is like the pure child that lives inside every equal-tempered adult.” In his view (and it comes close to Rameau’s), the tonal world of equal temperament brings with it the kind of ambiguity that manages to fool the ears into thinking they are hearing pure ratios. But, says Mathieu, we are actually built to resonate with the pure musical proportions. “Human beings don’t have to know about just intonation to understand
it,” he says. “We already are it.”

New York pianist and composer Michael Harrison also studied with Pandit Pran Nath, and worked extensively with composer La Monte Young, becoming the first person besides Young to perform that composer’s six-hour just-intonation work, The Well-Tuned Piano. Harrison converted a seven-foot grand piano into an instrument he calls the “harmonic piano,” which affords him, with the shift of a pedal, the ability to play up to twenty-four different notes per octave. There are also devices for controlling which strings are free to vibrate sympathetically. In 1991 he used this instrument to record an album, From Ancient Worlds.

One cold evening at the end of November 1999, I was invited to Harrison’s brownstone for a private recital. Earlier in the month, he had participated in a festival in Rome as one of four composer/pianists in the minimalist mode—a style of writing in which brief, repeating melodic fragments undergo a process of change over time, like precious stones turned slowly under a light. The other pianists on the program were Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Charlemagne Palestine. The morning after his recital, Harrison awoke with a new tuning in mind—he calls it his “revelation tuning.” It had come to him clearly, like a revelation, he reported. When he returned home and tried it on his harmonic piano, he found the results extraordinary: “It creates undulating waves of pulsating sonic energy,” he later related. “It is a tuning of so many beautiful sounds that every time I play it I discover new harmonic regions and feel like an explorer.” The secret, he revealed, was the inclusion in the tuning of three commas—those tiny “wolf” intervals that are usually avoided as too sour. He had found a way to weave them into a unique tapestry of sound.

The private recital at his home was an opportunity for Harrison to play his new tuning for a few friends and musicians, including composer Philip Glass. Glass, an icon of contemporary music whose credits include several operas, such as Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha, and collaborations with poet Allen Ginsberg and pop artists Paul Simon, David Byrne, and Laurie Anderson, arrived with a retinue. We all shared some wine and small talk before descending to a basement room, the locus of which was a glistening, ebony harmonic piano. The floor was strewn with cushions, and we each quickly settled onto one. Glass found a couch at the far end of the room and assumed a cross-legged position. And then, in the dim light, the music began.

It sounded like a jumble at first—a drone, or a room full of drones. Then, from within the din, high-pitched sounds seemed to rise and float toward the ceiling. The deeper Harrison played into the bass end of the instrument, the more he seemed to free an angelic choir above. Were these sympathetic vibrations? I wondered. Overtones? The clashing of strings just slightly out of tune? I couldn’t tell.

Now the texture changed. The pianist’s fingers engaged in a furious rhythmic interplay, and a groaning mass of sound in the low end of the piano gave birth to more phantoms above. Musical concords seemed to emerge and shake hands above the fray.

After a considerable amount of time, the music stopped. No one moved. Someone on the floor said, “My whole body is resonating.” The piano was silent, but we were all still spinning in a musical vortex. I looked at Glass on the couch; his eyes were closed. My mind wandered to the lamps in the room, the decorations on the walls. . . .

And then I thought fleetingly of Renaissance seekers like Bartolomeo Ramos and Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. I remembered the kabbalistic masters who described the sympathetic resonance between what is above and what is below. I contemplated the curious story of Huai Nan Tzu, his temperament theories and his ascent to heaven.

And I once again recalled the latest trend in modern physics, known as string theory, which holds that everything in the universe is composed not of atoms, but of infinitely thin vibrating strings—filaments that wriggle and oscillate incessantly in a great cosmic dance. What were once described as different elementary particles are, say physicists, really just different notes in an enormous celestial symphony.

And I thought: Perhaps Pythagoras was right after all.

Stuart M. Isacoff, a recipient of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music, is a pianist, a composer, and the editor in chief of Piano Today magazine. He has contributed to The New Grove Dictionary of American Music and has written for The New York Times. He lives in Bergen County, New Jersey.

Six Questions with the Author: Stuart Isacoff on Temperament



Stuart Isacoff
Photo courtesy Alfred A. Knopf
  • Excerpt from Temperament: The Idea That Solved Music’s Greatest Riddle

Stuart M. Isacoff, a recipient of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music, is a pianist, a composer, and the editor in chief of Piano Today magazine. He has contributed to The New Grove Dictionary of American Music and has written for The New York Times. He lives in Bergen County, New Jersey.

Molly Sheridan: To start out, what made you want to write a book on this topic in the first place?

Stuart M. Isacoff: I had come across the topic of ancient keyboard tunings on a number of occasions during the course of my work as a writer and editor of Piano Today. For example, I interviewed composer Lou Harrison for The New York Times when his Piano Concerto was being premiered in New York by Keith Jarrett and The American Composers Orchestra. At the time, Lou spoke a great deal about his affection for a tuning by Kirnberger, a student of J.S. Bach. But every time I looked into the subject I ran headlong into a series of mathematics treatises. I knew that people had fought very heatedly over this subject, but I couldn’t find the source of the heat.

Molly Sheridan: Why all the violence, I wondered—after all, some people went so far as to destroy each other’s instruments and reputations during the course of these tuning disputes—when the issue seemed to rest on a lot of dull minutia about pitch relationships? I knew there had to be a human drama behind the history of this seemingly arcane subject.

Stuart M. Isacoff: As it turned out, the more I looked into it, the more I was drawn into a human saga that embraced art, music, philosophy, religion, science, and more.

Molly Sheridan: Can you talk a bit about the process of writing the book—the research involved, the amount of time, surprise discoveries?

Stuart M. Isacoff: The process involved educating myself thoroughly in many areas I had never pursued before. For example, to learn about the roots of musical consonance, I had to study the theoretical contributions of Pythagoras. But to truly understand Pythagoras (including what motivated him) I had to immerse myself in the ways of ancient Greece. Similarly, to understand the cultural atmosphere in which musical temperaments came to the fore, I had to learn about Renaissance philosophy, the development of perspective in painting, and the changing view of planetary motion in the time of Kepler and Galileo. This process repeated itself throughout the writing of the book, which in the end encompasses a cultural history of the western world from the 6th century B.C.E. to the late 18th century (with a coda covering our current era). It took about four years, and I had to read some 300 books and articles to complete the project.

As for surprises, there is one on nearly every page of the finished product. I am now convinced that art and music developed in exactly the same ways in every period—that musical temperament, for example, is the equivalent of perspective in painting. For me, that was a surprise. I stumbled on connections that amazed me: I found parallels, for example, between the ideas of Pythagoras, the philosophy of Giordano Bruno (who was burned at the stake by the Church for heresy), and the radical, pro-equal temperament musical ideas of Galileo’s father, Vincenzo. I also learned about Isaac Newton‘s belief that the natural tones of the musical scale match the distances between the colors of a rainbow, and probed his earnest attempt to settle the temperament argument (which ended in failure). I watched Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who managed to extend his anti-authoritarian social theories into the realm of music, gain the support of many eighteenth-century scientists in his fight against Rameau, the greatest advocate of equal temperament in his day. Following the trail of musical temperaments into every corner and side alley was like being on a mind-expanding roller coaster.

Molly Sheridan: Like politics and religion, there seems to have been an intense passion surrounding the temperament argument (enough to write a whole book about) that crossed religious and scientific disciplines. Do you think a musical argument could ever take on that scope today?

Stuart M. Isacoff: I think the closest we come is in the fight between those who write and appreciate 12-tone music and those who don’t. Arnold Schoenberg attempted to eliminate the distinction between consonance and dissonance—concepts that served as the foundation for hundreds of years of western musical composition. Those concepts are based on the idea of “natural law” in music.

Schoenberg felt he could substitute his own will for nature’s. And that philosophical argument very much mirrors the kind of dispute that took place over the introduction of equal temperament.

Molly Sheridan: Who do you expect to read this book? What audience were you writing it for?

Stuart M. Isacoff: I was writing for an audience that likes an intellectual adventure story. Basically, I wrote a book that I would have enjoyed reading if someone else had done it. There were, of course, some underlying messages I wanted to convey, such as my point of view that every facet of life’s experience is connected to every other facet. I think most writing about music fails to take that larger context into account. And I also wanted to get across to as many people as possible the idea that music is so much more than mere entertainment. It is as deep and vast as the universe itself.

Molly Sheridan: Have you played around with various tunings much yourself?

Stuart M. Isacoff: Very little. Only in the course of doing research for the book.

Molly Sheridan: You mention several composers working today using different tunings. What do you think the future
holds for piano music using these variations? Would you expect more composers to be exploring this area?

Stuart M. Isacoff: In some ways, the modern piano is designed for equal temperament, and I love the sound of it. But there is plenty of room for experimentation. Michael Harrison is doing some amazing things on his “harmonic piano,” using tunings and temperaments of his own design. Other composers, such as Easley Blackwood, are writing fascinating music for equal temperaments that divide the octave into many more than 12 parts. And I know there are many other musicians working in the area of microtonal tuning. Especially with the proliferation of inventive software, I think there will be even more exploration in this area. Indeed, as the tonal vs. serial fight loses steam, temperament may be the next big thing.

Twelve Steps

“Systems, being easier to understand than art, dominate academic history.”

—Brian O’Doherty

There must be twelve-step programs for people like me. I confess: I’m a recovering serialist.

When I was sixteen my first composition teacher taught me the mechanics of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system. Before long (under the influence of Messiaen and Stockhausen), I began experimenting with “total serialism.” Using 12×12 matrices I applied serial techniques not just to pitch but to other elements of musical sounds—(“parameters” in the parlance). Duration, dynamics, articulation, even timbre could be controlled by twelve-step permutations.

As a puzzle or a game, making music this way was mildly intriguing. But the sound usually left me cold. So I never became a devout serialist. Ruggles and Feldman appealed to my ear more than Schoenberg and Webern. And those matrices of serial permutations didn’t seem much different from the charts of durations and sonorities that John Cage used in his works of the late ’40s and early ’50s. So it didn’t take long for me to gravitate decisively toward experimentalism, minimalism, and other sources closer to home. These eventually led me to my own musical world.

But at least one aspect of serialism has stayed with me all these years: I think in intervals rather than degrees of scales. And although my music hardly sounds atonal, beneath the surface is a logic that has roots in serialism. Over the decades I’ve discovered the elements of my own harmonic and melodic world by shifting and combining fixed sets of intervals. At times I’ve also worked with rhythmic permutations which I derived more directly from Cage, but which he originally derived from Schoenberg.

Serialism is a system of inductive logic that can be used to determine all the details of a musical work. Like all systems (and unlike art) serialism can be taught, which probably explains its persistence in academia. By comparison the deductive linear processes of minimalism are transparent, and minimalist music is still regarded as an unsophisticated guest in many conservatories. But it seems to me that minimalism and serialism share more in common than first meets the ear.

Last year Frank Oteri and I visited the Sol LeWitt retrospective at the Whitney Museum. Walking around LeWitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes and Serial Project No. 1, I was struck by the underlying similarities between serialism and minimalism. Just as LeWitt’s compositional processes produced varied series of geometrical forms, Schoenberg’s serialism churned out pitches and the processes of musical minimalism chugged out rhythm.

Although the sounds were different, the techniques of both serialism and minimalism were machines for making music. While the additive rhythmic processes and phase-shifting of classic minimalism were clearly audible, in serialism the logic was usually beneath the surface. But both gave composers new tools for doing what composers do ­ making musical compositions.

I’ve always been fascinated with musical processes and forms. Like all composers my toolbox of techniques contains well-used tools from a variety of sources, including serialism and minimalism. My music has always been rigorously formal, but recently I’ve found myself gravitating away from clearly audible forms and processes. I hope my own idiosyncratic methods still give the music a coherence that’s somehow apparent to the listener. But I’m less interested in musical machines and more interested in music that sounds like it might occur in nature.

What kind of musical logic interests you? Do you want it to be audible? Or is it enough to sense the unity beneath the surface?

Has serialism influenced the music you listen to and make?

Is Serialism Still Relevant?

Victoria BondVictoria Bond
“…Surely then, this is a language with endless potential, but how to use it, apply it and make it one’s own rather than merely pasting it over an inhospitable and alien landscape?…”
Erik SchaepersErik Schaepers
“…Those works which have survived because of their inner beauty and originality were created by individuals, who composed music on their own terms, independent of historic prophecies and unencumbered by ‘historic necessity.’…”
Donald ErbDonald Erb
“…Serialism will always be of historical interest and there will always be performances of Pierrot Lunaire, but the movement as a whole has long been dead….”
Dan WelcherDan Welcher
“…For me, serialism is a very useful tool; it’s just not the only tool….”

Not Just for Breakfast Anymore?

Frank J. Oteri, Editor and Publisher
Frank J. Oteri
Photo by Melissa Richard

As a high school student, my favorite subject after music was probably math. So, as soon as I learned about serial music and its mathematical underpinnings, I was intrigued. I spent the better part of my senior year mulling over the 12-tone score of Alban Berg’s Lulu and when I discovered the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, I found a role model far more rebellious than any of the punk rockers my classmates were obsessed with at the time.

Yet when I arrived as an undergraduate at Columbia University, the dodecaphonic music that was the then lingua franca of the music department seemed oppressive: intolerant, inflexible and, ultimately, stagnant. Falling in love with serialism as a high school rebel, I now turned to more rebellious music-makers like Charles Ives and Harry Partch. When an utterance of the name Alvin Lucier was met with boos and hisses at an all-day Varèse Centennial seminar during my senior year, it made me a lifelong Lucier fan.

The minimalist movement, which was emerging all over the city but which was almost completely ignored by my college professors, seemed much more timely as well as more engaging both intellectually and emotionally. And, unlike the dogma-dictated music that serialism seemed to be to me by this point, minimalism was an equally rigorous mathematically-structured music that offered many more options for individual expression, allowing the incorporation of microtonal intervals, improvisation, world music traditions, etc.

But, of course, a lot of the lessons learned in school don’t pan out in real life. As a mature consumer of adventurous music, I find myself turning to rigorous twelve-tone composers more and more. Where its connotations were once intimidating as a music student, I can now revel in much of the music of Wuorinen, Martino, and Davidovsky as a listener. And without academic approval, I’ve discovered composers such as James Tenney, Ben Johnston, and Bruce Arnold who’ve incorporated serial procedures into minimalism, microtonality, and even jazz. As a composer, in the last couple of years I’ve actually found myself dabbling in serial ideas again for the first time in 20 years now that the mainstream media has villainized dodecaphony: always wanting to root for the underdog!

So, the question needs to be asked. Why is 12-tone music intimidating? I would argue, from a healthy distance, that the intimidation has nothing to do with a great deal of the music, which is quite wonderful, but with the culture of inflexibility that seemed to have surrounded it during its ascendancy. Trouble is, human nature almost predicts that any other -ism in ascendancy would have been equally intractable. Now that serialism has been declared a paper tiger, its bite is no longer dangerous, but the bite of those who demonize it can be!

For the 12th and final 2001 issue of NewMusicBox, we’ve decided to put a human face on serialism. A lengthy conversation (in no less than 12 parts!) with the mastermind of total serialism, Milton Babbitt, reveals a multifaceted personality equally fascinated by baseball, beer, and old Broadway showtunes. James Reel’s HyperHistory of American serialism is a virtual serialism 101 (or perhaps 012). Donald Erb, Victoria Bond, Dan Welcher, and Eric Schaepers offer four very different thoughts about the relevance of serialism to the music of today and its potential influence over the music of the future. Finally, we’d like your thoughts on the historical significance of this most typecast of musical procedures.

On a much grander scale in our society, we have seen how intolerance can subsume humanity all over the world. But even in our safer, narrower realm of long-form music appreciation, intolerance is dangerous. Throughout November, our issue on minimalist music inspired some extraordinarily negative anti-minimalist tirades both in personal e-mail correspondence and in our public interactive forum. I imagine that fanatics on the other end of the aesthetic spectrum will decry this tribute to serialism with equal bellicosity. But, just as American culture is multi-faceted and polymorphous, so too is American music. And the true fan of American music should be able to appreciate equally the arpeggios of Philip Glass and the combinatorial hexachords of Milton Babbitt as well as the sheets of sound of John Coltrane, the high lonesome vocals of Bill Monroe, and the shrieks of no-wave punk rockers like Lydia Lunch whom I foolishly missed out on in high school.

When serialism can be listened to and appreciated as one of many valid streams of contemporary American music-making rather than the inevitable evolution of Western classical music, it will sound more exciting than ever before!

Dirty Dozens: A HyperHistory of Serialism



James Reel Originally, Retrograded, Inverted, and Retrograded & Inverted
Serial permutations by Amanda MacBlane

A fad diet called serialism swept the American academy some 40 years ago. It promised to shed the fat of Romanticism, loosen the gristle of Futurism, tone the flab of Impressionism. Serialism was scientific, developed and refined by the leading minds of Europe. Serialism was intellectual and elevating, certain to flex the mental muscles of composers and boost the stamina of audiences. And serialism wasn’t merely some sugar-coated or caffeinated short-term supplement; it was a total change of musical lifestyle, a regimen that would last a lifetime.

Well, here we are less than a lifetime later, and a concert program featuring a new, strictly serial work is as rare as a restaurant menu offering the dieter’s special of peach half and cottage cheese on a lettuce leaf. Yet our current cultural nutritional guidelines retain some of the tenets of the serialism diet. Claims that serialism is dead aren’t quite true. And, in any case, to understand American music since the middle of the 20th century, you have to understand serialism and its special appeal to university-based composers in the 1950s and ’60s.

The story of mid-century American serialism, though, begins in Europe before World War I, with the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg. (American insurance salesman Charles Ives claimed to have developed the principle behind serialism first, but Ives revised his early music so heavily in later decades that one hesitates to take him seriously. Besides, Ives failed to influence other composers at the time, whereas Schoenberg’s theories almost immediately inspired a near religion of aesthetics that drew disciples from across Europe and North and South America.)

With Schoenberg’s emigration to the United States in the 1930s, serialism was well on its way to becoming an American phenomenon. Claims for Boulez and Stockhausen aside, ultimately it took American know-how to completely systematize Schoenberg’s system. German armed forces didn’t even come close to conquering the United States, but after the war, it was German music theory that occupied America. Serialism’s elegant complexity finally brought self-respect to a nation of composers fighting America’s century-old (and only partly deserved) reputation of derivative provincialism and naive populism. And despite serialism’s seemingly intractable strictness, American individualism found new ways around the system. The movement even attracted a few women composers.

The serialists reigned supreme in American art music for a good two decades. They were firmly ensconced in the academy, which had become about the only place composers, like poets, could count on making a living, and they zealously imparted the harsh wonders of serialism to their students. Serialists sat on the boards that awarded grants, prizes, and occasional recording opportunities to other serialists. Even such senior American-based composers as Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky took up the technique toward the end of their careers, determined not to be regarded as living fossils.

In the outside world, though, the realm of symphony subscribers and ordinary chamber-music mavens, serialism never caught on. Open-eared audiences developed a certain respect for the more tonal-sounding serial works and the musicians brave enough and skilled enough to play them, but no serial composition, aside perhaps from Alban Berg’s reasonably accessible Violin Concerto and Lyric Suite, entered America’s standard repertory. We’re conditioned to understand the patterns and hierarchical relationships of diatonic music; general audiences had neither the training nor the inclination to sort out the complex, severe beauties of serial works. Indeed, many listeners categorized serialism along with aleatorics and musique concrète as sheer noise to be avoided at all costs. Music had become composer-centered and theory-besotted, and came to have no more impact on the general public than the proverbial tree falling in an uninhabited forest.

Since the Bicentennial commissions of 1976 exuberantly imposed a great variety of new music on American listeners, U.S. composers—employing a multitude of techniques and aesthetic theories—have become more sensitive to the limitations of the public ear, and listeners have become more receptive to new music in general (nudged along, in part, by the increasingly avant-garde tendencies of certain branches of popular music and the fresh scales and rhythms of world music). American composers and audiences alike have unashamedly embraced a new hedonism, more instinctive music propelled by rhythm, timbre and, sometimes, tune. Such serial composers as George Perle, who wrote with the public in mind all along, are in no immediate danger of eclipse. But the serialists have lost their hegemony.

Twelve-tone techniques remain popular in determining the pitch content of new electro-acoustic music, but otherwise serialism is just one more collection of tools at a composer’s disposal. Serialism’s high priests and fervent devotees are going the way of the Druids. Yet just as the Druidical veneration of nature survives in different forms among this country’s population of environmentalists (and, yes, New Agers), serialism has permanently insinuated some vestige of itself into the subconscious of composers who value rigor, craftsmanship, and intellectual challenge, even if they now prefer to achieve these values through other means.

Inner pages:

Minimal Music, Maximal Impact

Without any doubt whatever, the most important musico-historical event of my lifetime has been the advent of minimalism. Like most composers of my generation, I have drawn musical ideas from many sources: non-Western cultures (Native American, in my case), microtonality, the American experimental tradition, Mozart, American vernacular musics, the Darmstadt avant-garde, and on and on and on. Most of those ideas, though, have been welcomed into my music in the context of minimalism’s revival of simplicity and audible structure; in fact, I could have never integrated some of those ideas had minimalism not provided an open enough framework. If you’re writing in a Babbitt-derived serialist style, for example, it’s difficult to work in elements of Japanese Gagaku no matter how-the-hell-impressed you are.

Minimalism hit me in my teens like a bolt of fate. About 1972 (I was 16), Steve Achternacht on radio station WRR-FM in Dallas played Terry Riley’s In C on the air. I was in the habit of recording anything 20th-century listed in the program guide – in fact, anything by a composer I hadn’t heard of. I was heavily into Ives and Varèse and Elliott Carter and Cage and Babbitt and Stockhausen, and my obsession was musical complexity. Whether structured or random, it didn’t matter. Then Terry Riley’s janglingly repetitive octave C’s started up (which we learned years later had been Steve Reich’s suggestion to hold the piece together), and I didn’t know how to react. This was crazy. All that pulsating repetition gave me a headache, every time I listened. But I kept listening anyway, and wore that tape down to a thin ribbon without any idea whether I liked it or not.

Next I went off to college (Oberlin Conservatory), where we young composers gloried in analyzing Webern, Berio, and Boulez. I was writing music of unremitting dissonance, crashing sevenths and ninths all over the place, simultaneous layers of activity, tone rows and chance processes all washing around in one big incomprehensible soup. Steve Reich’s ensemble actually came to Oberlin that year (spring of 1974) and I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t go: some older composers told me he was making boring music, just playing the same thing over and over again. And I believed them.

That summer, 1974, Reich’s Deutsche Grammophon three-record set came out: Drumming, Six Pianos, and Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ. Almost the same week, in a curious old record store in Austin that’s no longer there, I ran across the old Chatham Square recording of Philip Glass’s Music in Changing Parts. I kicked myself for missing that Reich concert. It was like heaven itself had opened up to me and shown me not a vision of the future at all, but better than that, the beginning of the road to the future. I had come into the world at the end of an old, complex, overweighted style groaning with European modernist baggage, and history offered me a chance to step onto the ground floor of a bold new enterprise. I didn’t even try to resist.

In January of 1976 I formed a short-lived group called the Realtime Ensemble and gave the Dallas premieres of Music in Fifths, Piano Phase, and In C, along with my own minimalist works (my first was called Satie’s Dream, a 1975 “white-note” piece with no sharps or flats) and those of my friends. Ever since, I’ve been working out the implications I found in Glass’s Einstein on the Beach and La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano. A few years ago I interviewed Glass and told him I was still trying to rewrite the Bed Scene from Einstein. He replied, “So am I.”

What was it about the brazenly simple early minimalist style that seduced hundreds of complexity-loving proto- or postserialists like myself to strip down to a handful of pitches? Well, postserialism, as I saw it, was all about subtlety: the echo of a pitch cell, the gradual transformation of register, underlying rhythmic repetitions and retrogrades. But in serialism’s complicated musical contexts, you couldn’t hear any of that subtlety. We’d fill our scores with hundreds of great little devices, we thought, but they would disappear in performance, wasted, lost, overwhelmed. It was kind of painfully obvious that we were writing music not to be heard and loved, but only to be analyzed by future music students like ourselves.

Suddenly, in Drumming and Piano Phase and Music in Fifths, we could hear the type of effects we’d been seeking, blown up to an audible scale. In the phased repetitions of Reich’s Come Out, you heard speech become melody – a startlingly clear effect after lots of dubious ’60s experimentation with musical speech. In In C, we found melodic ideas echoing back and forth in random arrangements. In Glass’s Music In Fifths, we found bracingly irregular rhythms that, thanks to the minimalist melodic process, were not only playable but hearable. A lot of what serialists had aimed for in a vague, abstract way was now obtainable in a repetitive, audible, playable, feelable new set of processes.

And at the same time, music had become open once again to make one’s personal mark. The big, omnidissonant, ultracomplex style we had all been writing in was so impersonal, so unchanged from one work and one composer to another. Now, the slightest change of a tonality, a different scale, a different set of rhythmic values, made all the difference in the world. No one I knew thought Piano Phase was the be-all and end-all of music, but it was a starting point, something even I, young as I was, might take, develop, and improve upon.

So astounded was I that I expected all the world to take part in that revolution with me. And if the advent of minimalism was the great event of my life, the big disillusionment was the gradual realization that minimalism was never going to receive universal approval. Despite having produced the most publicly popular new works of the last third of the 20th century, minimalism remains controversial, damned in academic and intellectual circles. The fact that I like the music, am influenced by it as a composer, and teach it keeps me marginalized in academic circles. Even where minimalism has gained grudging acceptance by classical musicians, the idea that there are musical styles that have grown from minimalism is considered heresy. Forty-one years after La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 No. 7, 37 years after Terry Riley’s In C, 27 years after Reich’s Deutsche Grammophon set, 25 years after the premiere of Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, the classical music and academic establishments are still chopping away at the tree of minimalism. But that tree has deep roots, and it grows more quickly than anyone imagines. It won’t be chopped down.

After all, minimalism is not an isolated, aberrational phenomenon. It has important historical parallels from the past. It fits in, in interesting and unexpected ways, with the American Experimental Tradition that started with Henry Cowell and Charles Ives and continued through Varèse, Partch, Cage, Nancarrow, and others. Minimalism does not consist merely of the outputs of four famous composers – originally in the 1960s there were dozens of composers involved in a feverish, irascible exercise of group creativity. Nor has minimalism been a dead end: at least two important movements in American music have arisen from it, which I call Postminimalism and Totalism. Accept it or not, minimalism’s impact on American music has been powerful, and will continue to be so for many decades.

Inner Pages:

Is Minimalism still relevant?

Charlie HoytCharlie Hoyt
“It’s going to be a while before we see people roaming the streets in Steve Reich t-shirts and blasting Górecki from their car stereo systems…”
Randall WoolfRandall Woolf
“By now, I am good and sick of minimalism in my own music. I have not at all lost interest in the early minimalists…”
Wendy Mae ChambersWendy Mae Chambers
“Obviously, minimal music will continue to go on as it has in the religious context…”
Robert MaggioRobert Maggio
“Minimalism is definitely relevant today and it will continue to be part of our listening for years to come…”