Wes Crone wrote:

>Now let me comment on sonata form.  I have already included a posting
>abotu the differnce between formal design and tonal system design.  I don't
>really want to reiterate all of that here so I will keep it short.  Form is
>like a cake pan or a jello mold.  the ingredients are tonal but differnet
>forms make differnet cakes.  Hmm....Consider the form like a cake pan and
>the ingredients to be the tones.  It doesn't mater much to me what the cake
>looks like as long as it tastes/sounds good.  But, if you decided to create
>a predetermined system for what ingredients will be added, culminating with
>a system that requires totalitarian treatment of the tones, you may well
>end up with a nasty piece of cake.  You may, then again, find that the cake
>is the best you've ever had.  Whoi knows.....it only really matters to you
>and your own opinion.  I hope that analogy wasn't too out of whack.

I'm sorry, but you seem to have the wrong idea of the 12-tone system as
I'm not very happy with the musical form = cake mould analogy.  In the
case of cake, as we say in Germany, 'it all ends up in the one stomach',
so ultimately it's not very important what shape it has.  However, the form
of a work is one of its essential elements, and ideally you want it to have
some discernable relationship with the ingredients used.  A formalistic
piece may still sound good at the time, but as a whole it will not be very
meaningful.

However, I would agree with you about the musical merit of strict serial
compositions: if the entire piece (or even just the pitch of the notes)
is pre-determined by some initial formula, then the audible end-product
is just a product of mathematics, not of considerations of how the piece
should *sound* - I would not call such a piece music at all.  With regard
to the 'totalitarian' nature of the duodecaphonic system (about which I
know almost nothing): it may be that Schonberg got more dogmatic as he
got older.  While I do not know any of his writings on duodecaphony, I
have read in his book on harmony (Harmonielehre), and one point he makes
repeatedly is that musical rules or principles should never be set in
stone, but can always be rebutted by other considerations if you come to
the conclusion that these are more important.

Felix Delbruck
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