D. Stephen Heersink wrote:

>Duodecaphonic compositions do not always have melody, harmony, or both, and
>therefore do not always fit the shared conceptual understanding of music.
>Simply ordering all twelve chromatic pitches, or the sharing of the use of
>similar instruments, aren't sufficient to merit duodecaphonic compositions
>with the appellation of "music."

I'm afraid this argument does not hold up on examination - you've moved the
question "what's music?" to "what is melody or harmony?".

At bottom there seems to be a Potter Stewartism at work here.  Why not
focus more directly on what your criticisms of the music are, rather than
engaging in elaborate sophistry? Why not come to terms with the idea, and
its results and give a clear and cogent criticism?

The difference is that while sophistry fortifies the resolve of those who
have already decided, reason and peotry are capable of persuading the as
yet undecided.

And this is important - because in art particularly we often decide that we
should like something or ought to pursue a particular direction, and bring
our tastes along with us.

- - -

But let us be clear - the central argument, in intellectual circles, of
the post-war era in classical music was over the avant-garde in all of
its various flavors.  And this argument was inevitable, because it was
the central argument in intellectual circles of the time.  Atonality -
and particularly Serialism and Duodecophony may have been the most visible
representative, but one must also include chance music, musique concrete,
electronic music.  And each of these were representative of a deeper
intellectual schism.

A number of people throw around the phrase "music of our time" as a kind of
all consuming blessing.  It is not.  If "Our time" is the 1913-1945 period,
we are talking about an era which witnessed horrors on a scale undreamt of.
If "our time" is the post war era, roughly 1946-1990, then we are talking
about an era where the assured anhilation of multi-cellular organism on the
planet was enshrined as the central tennet of international diplomacy, and
a rigid ideological war between two super powers and their allies consumed
millions of lives, most of them civilian.

If a music is to be of "our times" then it, to be honest and accurate,
must contain within it not only the triumphs of the age, but its foibles,
failures and falsenesses.  On can critique the late 19th century through
critiquing Wagner's opera dramas - its petty racisms, its nihilistic
fear of its rag to riches rise, its lies to shroud deep insecurities,
its bombast and stullifying weight - as much as one can hail the age's
technological advancements, organisational acheivements and search for
sublime beauty in unified action.

Let me take an analogy.  The 20th century was born in physics based on
two disturbing revelations - the overthrow of the notion of absolute space,
heart of Newtonian Mechanics - and the resolution to the age old question
of whether light was a wave or a particle in favor of "both and neither -
sometimes at once".  The formalisms which codified these two notions were
incompatible with each other, and the second - Quantum Electro Dynamics -
was and is incompatible with itself.

The result was that 20th century physics became divided into three camps.
One group of people did not attempt to scale either question.  A great
deal of pratical engineering can be done without either, and a goodly
portion of the average kinematics course is material we know to be
inaccurate - a recap of Newton's theory of space and motion.  A second
camp took Relativity as the primary theory - treating the universe as
"real" and objects as "real".  A third camp decided that if the quantum
formalism allowed for only the wave function, then only it, not the
electrons and light particles that composed physics to that point - was
real.

Einstien, codifier of the first and midwife in the paper on the
photoelectric effect to the second, could never accept the strong
interpretation of QED - known to history as "the Coppenhaggen school".
Ironically the most powerfully persuasive proof of quantum theory came out
of experimental proof of a paradox proposed by Einstien - that particles
travelling apart at light speed did in fact "know" what happened to the
other.

At base the three camps represented three reponses to the modern challenge.
One was to simply muddle along as best as possible, holding to old
certainties where they still applied and old concepts.  The second really
represented a reformed version of the past.  Once one accepts guassian
space and the principle of equivelance, Einstienian Mechanics does physics
in much the same way as Newtonian Mechanics, with the same geometrical
conceptualisation of the truth - and that therefore the way of being was to
have an old style mastery of new materials.  The third took the declaration
that one had to stake ones very self on the new - that ones conception of
real and beautiful had to be interwoven with an acceptance that only the
new formalism was true.

These three camps correspond rather directly to the three camps of music
in the 20th century.  The first corresponds directly to those who wrote
tonality in the old form, the second to the strands of neo-classicism,
the third to the musical avant-garde.

If this were an attempt to sort the winners in music out, it would be about
the results in the physics and some extension of those results to music.
But music is not science, and what is important is not how the three world
views played out in science, but how there is a corresponding human reality
in both realms, and that the same conflict of being which pervades one
pervades the other.  In fact that conflict goes on to this day.

This because what is incommensurable to many is not a particular formalism
- whether serial or quantum - but two opposing senses of how people must
live and exist.  Each demands a capitulation from the other.  That which
we see in the universe is real, or it is not real and only the result of
observation of interactions - either 12 tone music is "noise" or it is the
only music which is truly "of our time", which will supplant all previous
music.

This incommensurability rests on a conflict of basis - either one places
ones faith in the ability to create beauty with the new, and hope that,
since one is made of the same clay as others, that they will see so as well
- or one places ones faith in the ability to adapt oneself to an external
standard as beautiful - since it is ordered.

While views and physics can be reconciled - both in music and science -
world views which demand victory cannot be, because these are the kinds
of choices that demand affirmation by others making the same choice.  It
is not enough for people to play Boulez - all right thinking people must
admire Boulez.  Duodecophony must be "unmusical" or "noise".

- - -

In some sense the only way out of this thicket is death, people who cannot
accept will die, and the hot issue dies, because its era dies.  Strange
that a debate focused on how to survive an era ends, because no one
survives in the long run.

But it is so.

What all of this means is rather simple - new eras require new ways
of being.  We have the question of "being digital" and have become
obsessed with a phrase our forefathers would have laughed at "intellectual
property".  We have a generation of people who have staked themselves on
the internet and on a rising market.  The same essential question - how to
be a self in the face of outside pressures - remains, but the pressures are
different.

And this is why the old argument keeps coming up - it is far less
terrifying than facing the present question, for which the answers
we come to really do matter.

Stirling Newberry
http://www.mp3.com/ssn
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