David Lewis writes:

>Well, what I hear in a lot of dodecaphonic music is 12-tone "cliches"- the
>rising ninth, falling tri-tone, "atmosphere" built out of adjacent tones,
>etc.  My ears are accustomed to them, but that makes them no more fresh.
>
>We probably have film music to blame for this.  After 50 years of music in
>the "13th key" I suspect the time to absorb the style into other things and
>MOVE ON is probably long past.

Though I would agree that some film music may account for the passiveness
of the listening apparatus for those who associate dodecaphonic music, in
some fundamental way, with a sense of unease, this hardly embraces the
issue in its entirety.  While I cannot dispute that what Mr.  Lewis hears
or understands as "cliche'" is, in the context he presents his argument
here, too general to engage a rebuttal; more specific examples of this
tendency would be necessary for that.  Even so, what Mr.  Lewis calls
cliche I would be more inclined to call motivic figuaration and indeed,
convention.  Tritones, for example, whose most endearing characteristic,
other than dividing a scale symetrically in two (which no other intervfal
can), are their transpositional invariance, were the sine qua non of pre
Renaissance sacred music as well, at least in Solemnes and in the early
chant of the eastern Orthodox church.  By no means, in spite of the
saturation of this so-called diabolus in musica in the musical products
of several centuries of works that even preceded modern notation, can
the phenomenon be referred to, by any stretch of the imagination, as
"cliches'".  On the contrary, it was simply an interval whose predominance
was a given, whose raison d'etre and ability to resolve either inwards upon
itself (onto a major triad) - or outwards (onto a major sixth) and which
was ultimately a part of the idiosyncratically Byzantine semiology that
embraced its character as much as its use value.  Unlike Mr.  Lewis would
like to suggest here, musical composition does not stand still, but evolves
in time and through time; an if it is to stand the test of time (or what
Mikhail Bakhtin called "great time" ,) it must reinvent the genres that
engendered it in the first place, and the conventions that gave form and
voice to those genres.  Thus, where Mr.  Lewis might only hear cliches in
Boulez's Pli Selon Pli, for example, I hear innovation, unusual and
challenging rhyhtmic shapes, and the elaboration of an aesthtetic
philosophy that satistisfies its own concept.

>BTW, after a long absence, I'm back.  Hello to anyone who might remember
>me from past postings

I don't remember, but welcome back nevertheless.

John Bell Young