8 composers you can live without

[pastoralguy]

Wagner x 8!

[Richard Barrett]

It seems to me obvious that there are certain stylistic criteria that one must use in order for something to be called serial or any other form.

I don't think that's true. As I say, serial composition is a method which doesn't imply any particular style. Attention has already been drawn on this thread to examples from Schoenberg himself where pitches are repeated before all twelve chromatic pitch-classes have occurred, and I found your second trait interesting because I'd honestly never come across this idea before, or noticed it in serially-composed music. No deliberate misconstruction intended - I just find it strange that serial methods of composition are so often described as defining a style when they don't. In addition I would say that it isn't necessarily possible to tell whether a piece of music has been composed using this method or not. You will for example never hear explicitly the 12-tone series on which Gruppen was composed - it constitutes a structural principle in Stockhausen's music rather than melodic material as it does in Schoenberg. Really the only way to know that Gruppen is serially-composed, without a close study of the score, is that the composer said it was.

[EdgeleyRob]

You might find this very useful, too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLRlpB6PvD8

... as it has the 1931 Tonal harmonization of the melody as well as the dodecaphonic melody itself. On the video, the Twelve-Note set is heard in its "Basic" (or Original) form between 0.33" - 0.45", the Retrograde Inversion between 0.46" - 1'03", the Retrograde between 1'04", and the Inversion when the Violins take over the melody between 1'15" - 1'32" (the end of the melody). The two Inversion versions () are Transposed a minor Third down - and there are three occasions when a note is repeated immediately within a phrase, so anyone counting up to twelve without listening will get stuck! Annoying, perhaps, but then Arnie was a "Twelve-note composer", not a "Twelve-note Composer".

Incidentally, the three repeated notes are B, G and F#, which is a permutation of notes 6, 7 & 8 of the Inversion.

More immediately useful is the characteristic "Arnie's yearning" Iambic rhythmic shape (de-yaa da-daa daa) of the melody, which also appears throughout Verklaerte Nacht, and in Pelleas und Melisande, the Piano Piece BeefO gives, the Piano Concerto, the Second Movement of the Violin Concerto etc.

If you're really pressed for time, you could just show them this :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diYObAZqXiE

Wonderful,this is why I love this forum,thanks fhg.

[Richard Barrett]

Cheesehoven, do you think all baroque music sounds the same? I don't think there's defensiveness going on, but if there is that's because (present company excepted) a lot of rubbish has been said and written and continues to be said and written about serial music.

I can hear what I term these stylistic tendencies in serialism notwithstanding composer's individualistic takes on them

To take a couple of off-the-cuff examples: Schoenberg's Erwartung certainly sounds as if it could be a serial composition, although it isn't; Stockhausen's Inori (or even Stimmung) doesn't sound like I think you would imagine a serial composition "should", despite being very strictly composed using serial methods.

[cheesehoven]

My (as I thought) innocuous list certainly sparked off more comment than I had expected (I expected none, to be honest). My apologies if I have made a poor job in explaining my position and using perhaps the wrong words for what I experience when I listen to serial (or any) music. I do not find baroque music sounds similar to me, but I could imagine that someone else would and could quite understand their position. As far as the classical style goes I do hear a certain sameness about it, whether it chamber, orchestral or vocal. There is a basic dna to the music, a certain contrivance that I sense as much as hear: the musical ideas have been fitted to a Procrustean bed.

This sense of contrivance I get even more from serialism. The music sounds forced and unnatural, it cannot proceed in an organic way since huge efforts are constantly required to avoid the gravitational pull of tonality. It lumbers about seemingly shapeless but paradoxically having a shape defined by absolute rigidity. The textures are often interesting for a while but soon pall.

I have made a lot of efforts to try and get on with serialism, I am very familiar with Berg, Webern, Schoenberg, less so with their later followers; I have read many books and watched lectures (and the rule about avoiding emphasising the high note of a phrase certainly exists. I have had it from several sources including a lecture by Leonard Bernstein I saw recently on youtube...but this merely confirmed what my ears had told me from my listening) but I can't get on with it, except in small bursts. Beyond what I've said, I don't think I can explain further. But yes, I do find serial music samey, and capable of a much narrower emotional range than tonal or even modal music.

[Quarky]

This sense of contrivance I get even more from serialism. The music sounds forced and unnatural, it cannot proceed in an organic way since huge efforts are constantly required to avoid the gravitational pull of tonality. It lumbers about seemingly shapeless but paradoxically having a shape defined by absolute rigidity. The textures are often interesting for a while but soon pall.

I have made a lot of efforts to try and get on with serialism, I am very familiar with Berg, Webern, Schoenberg, less so with their later followers; I have read many books and watched lectures (and the rule about avoiding emphasising the high note of a phrase certainly exists. I have had it from several sources including a lecture by Leonard Bernstein I saw recently on youtube...but this merely confirmed what my ears had told me from my listening) but I can't get on with it, except in small bursts. Beyond what I've said, I don't think I can explain further. But yes, I do find serial music samey, and capable of a much narrower emotional range than tonal or even modal music.

You appear to have a group of Hells Angels on your tail, Cheesehoven. Reading your posts, I get a picture of a listener who enjoys Baroque and Romantic music, but who is stuck in tonality. Your comments about gravitational pull refer to what is going on in your head in reaction to the music, rather than the music itself.

To get the best out of seralism/atonality, I feel a very acute ear is required, of the order of ferneyhoughgeliebte, for whom all the strange intervals are no problem.

For us lesser mortals, I feel there two important issues. Firstly to throw away any preconceptions about what note should follow the one just heard, so that it is necessary constantly to reassess the sequence of notes held in memory. Secondly just to get as familiar as possible with all the non-tonal intervals present in atonal music.

No pain, no gain.

[MrGongGong]

For us lesser mortals, I feel there two important issues. Firstly to throw away any preconceptions about what note sould follow the one just heard, so it is necessary constantly to reassess the sequence of notes held in memory. Secondly just to get as familiar as possible with all the non-tonal intervals present in atonal music.

hummm

Maybe having a think about what you think music is "for" would be useful ?
Patrick Gowers used to have a collection of examples of music by Bach that appeared to have no key and sounded like early 20th Century music when listened to out of context, he used to play them to students and ask them to decide what the key was.

Maybe thinking that some intervals are "non-tonal' rather than they can be so in certain contexts is part of the "problem" ?
I'm not sure what a "non-tonal" interval is anyway ? it all depends on what is around it and how it is played, voicing, timbre etc. One of the things I was doing yesterday was making the audio examples for an online composition guide for music teachers. One set of examples consisted of a melody that was subjected to a series of transformations using software, what was interesting was that when the 3 players (who were from a very well known and experienced London Orchestra ) played versions where the pitches were randomised, the rhythms randomised etc it still sounded (as Cage's music does to my ears) like it had phrase, intention and was intensely "musical" . That is (IMV) because it was played by people , the computer version was interesting but not as much as when there were musicians in a room with instruments.


If you want your music to fulfil your desire of familiarity then there's a whole radio station for you (I'm not suggesting that you do !) having an idea that music can have a wider set of functions than that of entertainment leads (in my experience) to a much wider range of musics that one listens to and appreciates.

(After a Merzbow gig more or less ALL instrumental music sounds like Richard Clayderman )

[teamsaint]

All of which reminds me that Roberto Gerhard's music is patiently awaiting my time and attention.

I can live without it, but I don't want to.

[Richard Barrett]

This sense of contrivance I get even more from serialism. The music sounds forced and unnatural, it cannot proceed in an organic way since huge efforts are constantly required to avoid the gravitational pull of tonality.

As I said, there is actually no way one can in principle recognise a piece of music as having been composed using serial methods! What you seem to be talking about is Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, and if you don't get on with their music fair enough. I don't get on with Schoenberg's music either, for the most part.

This idea of "avoiding the gravitational pull of tonality" is an interesting one. It implies that tonality has the status of some kind of supra-cultural physical law, which in fact it doesn't. For a start it has only existed at all for four centuries or so, during at least half of which time its presence in the world was geographically very limited. Other musical traditions in the world organise their pitches without any reference to tonality: the gamelan music of Indonesia and the gagaku of Japan being two, for example, where sounding all the pitches in the scale simultaneously is quite commonplace and whose melodic materials are often presented in more than one mutually "dissonant" version at once. Given that there are ancient and sophisticated musical cultures (whose music can be understood and appreciated by Western listeners with a bit of background knowledge, just as is true the other way around) which have never developed tonality, there is in fact nothing fundamental about it.

Moreover, thinking that the compositional processes involved in the serial method are concerned with "avoidance" is mistaken. If you have it in your mind that the decisions made by a composer are principally motivated by wishing not to do something, then no doubt you're going to find the music contrived, but on the whole that isn't the way composers think; they will rather be thinking of achieving something that they do want, whatever the method used. The serial method is in the end a principle of structural organisation (and therefore of poetic expression also) which serves to liberate rather than constrict the composer's imagination.

Teamsaint, the more I get to know Gerhard's music, which I didn't take much notice of until a couple of years ago, the less I would be prepared to live without it. I'd prefer to hear one of Gerhard's symphonies to any orchestral music by Schoenberg any time.

And Oddball: I don't think any "pain" is involved, really I don't.

[Serial_Apologist]

Teamsaint, the more I get to know Gerhard's music, which I didn't take much notice of until a couple of years ago, the less I would be prepared to live without it. I'd prefer to hear one of Gerhard's symphonies to any orchestral music by Schoenberg any time.

And I love 'em both!!!

I do think there is an argument that would be advocates of Cheesehoven's might use, namely that tonality refers to a sense of harmonic rootedness wider than the major-minor diatonic system that usurped the old church modes in western music, which exists in many if not most musical traditions, manifested in ostinatos, riff-like motivic repetitions and drone-type underpinnings, and that it is this which is abandoned or excluded from serial but atonal musics in general. Steve Reich and John Adams have made statements of this kind, if I'm not mistaken, and I understand Hindemith to have argued such a line in his theoretical writings.

Personally I've always argued atonality as representing an evolution in musical consciousness, predicted in works by many "western" composers before Schoenberg, and not only Wagner in "Tristan".

[MrGongGong]

I do think there is an argument that would be advocates of Cheesehoven's might use, namely that tonality refers to a sense of harmonic rootedness wider than the major-minor diatonic system that usurped the old church modes in western music, which exists in many if not most musical traditions, manifested in ostinatos, riff-like motivic repetitions and drone-type underpinnings, and that it is this which is abandoned or excluded from serial but atonal musics in general. Steve Reich and John Adams have made statements of this kind, if I'm not mistaken, and I understand Hindemith to have argued such a line in his theoretical writings.

Does this explain the enthusiasm for La Monte Youngs music displayed by the "serialism is a dead end" school ?

I hear that Arnold Dreyblatt and Glen Branca are also very popular in the Cheesehouse

[Richard Barrett]

tonality refers to a sense of harmonic rootedness wider than the major-minor diatonic system

Tonality as such, though, is not so much about rootedness as about temporal progression, which is what in the end makes it different from modal systems. And harmonic rootedness is certainly not alien to music composed serially, as for example many of Luciano Berio's compositions show. I think the problem here is the illogical progression from (a) the music composed by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern and those composers obviously influenced by them is (i) serially-composed and (ii) not to my taste, to (b) all serially-composed music sounds like this and (therefore) it isn't to my taste because it was composed in that way.

[cheesehoven]

Thanks for detailed replies. I am now listening to Gerhard's first symphony on youtube am though I like it better than Schoenberg on first hearing, it sounds limited to my ears in that somewhat creepy, neurotic, morbid way I associate with extreme chromaticism and especially the serial school. Quite how much of this is my own cultural baggage (no doubt I first encountered such music in horror films) and how much it is inherent in the music I cannot say, but I do note that chromaticism has long been associated with extreme states from at least Gesualdo onwards.

I did listen to the opening of Inori last night before I went to bed. The opening 10 minutes did not actually sound like stereotypical serialism but rather minimalist- nice enough as background. After about 10 minutes however, the typical serial creepiness started to appear.

[Richard Barrett]

the serial school (...) typical serial creepiness

OK I give up.

[Serial_Apologist]

Does this explain the enthusiasm for La Monte Youngs music displayed by the "serialism is a dead end" school ?

I hear that Arnold Dreyblatt and Glen Branca are also very popular in the Cheesehouse

Very good points, GG!!!