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]
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