Steve Schwartz replies to Len Fehskens concerning serialism:

>> It failed to significantly affect the course of music in the 20th
>> century.
>
>You're kidding, right? It influenced even non-serial composers, including
>big names (furnished only on request).

This is where the constant sloppy confusion of the terms serialism and
duodecophony catches up with people - the schoenberg's free atonality and
12 tone method, which serial procedures are a descendant of - influenced
a lot of people - including Dmitri Schostakovich, Benjamin Britten, Aaron
Copland, Paul Hindemith, Bela Bartok, Oliver Messiaen, Henri Dutilleux,
Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Darius Milhaud.  Serialism - that is
parameterisation had converts, but much less influence as a procedure -
because it was a totality, either everything was precomposed or it wasn't.

As an idea it became, for a time, the cutting edge of an idea - that since
the modern world was about establishing process and accepting the results,
so too should art be.  As an idea it influenced the creation of electronic
music, aleatoric music, deconstructed music and minimalism.

Partially this is because of the atmosphere of the times, as Lukas
Foss explains it - "well you know, once you had done one thing from the
avant-garde, people thought of you that way, and you might as well take
up the rest of the techniques."

Serialism also had an impact disproportionately because its professors were
centered in many of the most prestigious schools, and were among the most
outspoke advocates, drawing students into pro or anti stances, and banning
from their classes certain things that were thought of as hold overs from
tonality.

But if it hadn't been serialism, it would have been something else - the
intellectual conflict that serialism was the banner movement for in music
ran across the soicety - for example in urban planning where buidling de
novo required knocking down whole neighborhoods - In Boston there was once
a "West End" that matched our "North End", and there was once "Scolley
Square" as opposed to "Government Center".

Stirling Newberry
http://www.mp3.com/ssn
[log in to unmask]