The following very interesting commentary is excerpted from an article
(which was later incorporated into liner notes) of the Concord Quartets
of George Rochberg.  To see the entire article, go to the link at:

   http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9806/opinion/linton.html

   In the decades following the Second World War "progressive" composition
   generally was pulled in two directions:  "serialism" and "chance."
   The former was a way of composing in which the twelve pitches of the
   octave are organized into melodic sets and presented forwards,
   backwards, upside-down, transposed, and fractured.  The serialism of
   Anton von Webern (1883-1945) was the first to exert its dominance.
   Webern's teacher, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), is credited with
   inventing serialism, but in the decade before his death, Webern
   refined twelve-tone composition into a means of producing music of
   the highest delicacy and most astringent intellectualism.  By the
   1950s, Webern had replaced both Stravinsky and Schoenberg as the
   brightest star in twentieth-century music, and his works became the
   model for all "smart" composition.

   There were many reasons for serial composition's attraction to
   composers.  One was the fact that the music and the mystique of
   Romanticism had been so appropriated by the Nazis that many
   intellectuals simply wanted it to perish in the Gotterdammerung of
   Nazi Berlin.  Serialism, and the distance it established between
   cerebral composition and emotional response, was seen as a language
   purified of the kinds of excesses that had lead to the horrors of
   the mid-century.

   Another reason for serialism's attractiveness lay in the fact that,
   at least in America, composers were increasingly university professors
   and not performers.  The star departments in American universities
   were the science departments, and the most acclaimed faculty were
   physicists.  The language of science is mathematics, and it was only
   natural that composers/professors would find themselves gravitating
   to the lingua franca of their locale.  The professors didn't compose
   for audiences, but for faculty peers (and tenure and promotion
   committees).  Serial music, with its sets, subsets, graphs, and
   pseudo-algebraic incantations, was a perfect artistic language for
   such a society-indeed, the music didn't even have to be defended by
   the way it sounded at all, but rather could be justified by the
   numerical and graphic brilliance of its description.

According to the liner notes, "The author, Michael Linton, is on the
faculty of Middle Tennessee State University.  A former student of Lucas
Foss and K.  Penderecki, Mr.  Linton is a composer and has twice been
awarded National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships."

In his liner notes for the quartets, he goes on to talk about the way
Rochberg first embraced, then later abandoned Serialism, and the horrified
reaction of the musical elite to this sacrilege.  I've listened to the
quartets just once, but already find much in them of great interest.  They
were written (mostly) in the late 70s, and incorporate both astringent
dissonance and tonality to excellent effect.  Other opinions??

Dave Wolf  [log in to unmask]