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]