Chris Bonds replies to me:

>but don't assume you understand the music of the 20th century if you close
>your ears to the rest of it.

I have not "closed my ears" to serialism.  You and others insist that if
we give something far more than the "old college try" and don't like it,
we have "closed our ears to it".  I don't know why *I* don't understand
it, why it grates on *my* ears, why it sounds no different *to me* than
aleatoric music.  *I* have made *no* value judgements about its quality;
I just don't like it, and have tried long enough that I feel no need to
continue to bank my ears against a wall trying to understand, never mind
enjoy it.  Actually, I *do* understand it in principle.  I have even
written serial music, and it still sounds random to me.  And calling
serialism "the rest of it" rather overweights its significance (see below).

>One may hold that opinion of serialism, and one may not understand
>it, and maybe people don't write using those techniques so much as
>they did 50 years ago, but it makes no sense to say it didn't pan out.

It makes sense to *me*.  For *me*, it doesn't pan out.  Again, read the
words that I actually wrote.

>That implies it was a failed experiment--that it tried to do something and
>failed.  WHAT did it fail to do? That is the question, and I haven't heard
>an answer yet.

It failed to significantly affect the course of music in the 20th
century.  Serialism in actuality was a drop in the bucket of 20th century
music.  Also please note that I am talking specifically about serialism,
not atonality or pantonality.  Serialism may have attracted a lot of
intellectual attention, but in terms of the total number of notes written
and listened to, it was a relatively minor byway of the 20th century.

len.