The history of twelve-tone music in the United States begins in May 1927, the month Adolph Weiss returned from studying with Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin and composed the first twelve-tone pieces written in the United States by an American composer.Footnote 1 Weiss became an important source of information for American “ultra-modern” composers (including Henry Cowell, Wallingford Riegger, Ruth Crawford, and Carl Ruggles) only three years after Schoenberg had first explained his new “method of composing with twelve tones” to his students.
Early twelve-tone composition by ultra-modern composers received a boost in the 1930s when first Schoenberg and then a small wave of European twelve-tone composers (including Ernst Krenek, Stefan Wolpe, and Hanns Eisler) arrived in the United States to escape Nazism and the war. Their arrival had an impact not only on music in the States, giving a new impetus to indigenous twelve-tone writing, but also on their own music: the European twelve-tone composers became Americanized to some extent, their twelve-tone styles modified by the change in their circumstances. The combined efforts of indigenous serialists and émigrés laid the groundwork for an upsurge of twelve-tone compositional activity during and after the Second World War. During the 1950s and 1960s, twelve-tone music became a prominent part of the contemporary music scene in the United States. A number of established composers (including Stravinsky, Copland, and Sessions) modified their compositional approach, influenced by these developments. Many composers of the next generation came to maturity as twelve-tone composers (including Milton Babbitt and George Perle) or modified an earlier style (including George Rochberg, Louise Talma, Ross Lee Finney, Arthur Berger, and Irving Fine), followed by yet another group of composers who grew up in the twelve-tone tradition (including Donald Martino, Ursula Mamlok, and Charles Wuorinen). Although the extent to which these composers dominated the music of this period is debatable, twelve-tone composition flowered in the United States in the decades following the war.
Beginning in the 1970s, twelve-tone music became less fashionable, but many composers continued to write it. While some composers (Rochberg and David Del Tredeci, for instance) turned away from twelve-tone composition, others (Elliott Carter and Ralph Shapey, for instance) found new ways of writing it. And although by this time twelve-tone music had been deemed passé, the longevity and continued activity of the leaders of the style (Babbitt, Martino, Wuorinen, Mamlok, Perle, Carter, among others) and the interest of a later generation of composers (including Joseph Schwantner, Peter Lieberson, Robert Morris, Andrew Mead, Jeff Nichols, Louis Karchin, Jonathan Dawe, Dan Welcher, and Judd Danby, among others), have ensured that twelve-tone music has remained an important part of American contemporary music into the first decade of the twenty-first century, continuing a vigorous tradition that has lasted for more than eighty years.
This extensive repertoire shares certain structural features, most notably the aggregate of all twelve tones as a referential harmonic unit and an ordered succession of tones as a source of motives, melodies, and harmonies. But even these very general compositional commitments are subject to individual modification, and American twelve-tone serial music has taken astonishingly varied forms. In many cases, twelve-tone music coexists with contrasting music within a single piece or movement. This is a distinguishing feature of “ultra-modern” twelve-tone composition, and has remained a consistent trend since then. In many cases (see, for example, the music of Talma, Gunther Schuller, and Hale Smith), twelve-tone structures are used in conjunction with, or in expression of, traditional tonality or current popular music. In many cases (see, for example, the music of Stravinsky, Wolpe, Sessions, and Mamlok), the aggregate is not a surface feature of the music but rather is part of its precompositional design: the music is full of doublings and emphases of all kinds, with direct statements of the complete aggregate a relative rarity. In every case, composers have created idiomatic and highly individual compositional designs—each has a distinctive way of composing serially.
Both the history and content of twelve-tone composition in the United States have long been mischaracterized in journalistic accounts and scholarly literature. Indeed, it is difficult to identify another repertoire so harshly attacked and little understood. This article aims to revise the history of American twelve-tone music by confronting some of the many myths that have accreted around it. In the process, I shall argue against two historiographic fallacies: the fallacy of the “great man” and the fallacy of stylistic evolution.
Twelve-tone music in the US is far from a monolith. As a result, many of the sweeping generalizations that appear in the literature are either simply false or apply to only a relatively small handful of works within a very large and varied repertoire. A widespread illusion is promoted that the music by one or two “great men” (usually Schoenberg and Babbitt) may be taken as representative or typical. There are, however, as many ways of writing twelve-tone music as there are composers of twelve-tone music—each composer finds a distinctive path, one that may change over time. Composers of twelve-tone music in the US are as varied as their music, in their gender, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, places of origin and residence, and professional circumstances. Instead of focusing on only one or two heroic figures and ignoring the rest, we must come to terms with the astonishing variety of twelve-tone music composed over the past eighty years. A more complete history of twelve-tone composition should not rely primarily on scholarly writings and journalistic accounts of this repertoire that are based on the composers' prose but should examine the music itself. This article accordingly offers brief, thumbnail sketches of the twelve-tone compositional style of more than thirty composers in order to offer a revisionist history grounded in the realities of compositional practice.
This article thus questions what has become an unjustifiably evolutionary historiography of American music since 1925, especially with regard to the position of twelve-tone music. Most historical accounts regrettably ignore the presence of twelve-tone music in the United States before and during the Second World War; virtually all historical accounts ignore its presence after 1970, even though many major composers have continued to produce serial music. These failures partly stem from an overriding interest in whatever is most fashionable—because twelve-tone music came to seem passé, it has tended to disappear from our historical accounts. Rather than engaging the traditional metaphors of stylistic rise and fall, and imagining our cultural landscape as a zero-sum game where yesterday's winners are today's losers, this article proposes that we regard American music since 1925 as a dynamic steady state within which twelve-tone serialism has long been, and still remains, a persistent presence.
The myths that have gathered around twelve-tone music in the United States have obscured its range and variety, its historical longevity, its most salient musical characteristics, and its position in American musical culture, both in an earlier period and in the present day. By identifying and debunking twelve particularly persistent and pernicious myths, I offer a more balanced musical and historical understanding of this important repertoire.
Myth No. 1: The Myth of Serial Origins
The myth of serial origins maintains that serialism burst upon the musical scene in the United States essentially as a postwar European import.
After the war neoclassicism and a folklike Americanism had waning appeal to younger composers. Like the late teens, the late '40s seemed a time bomb waiting to go off. Around 1950, it happened. All hell, it seemed, broke loose. Serious composers, experimental in the 1920s, socially aware in the 1930s, and quieted by war in the 1940s, suddenly diverged in two totally different but equally radical paths. Some, extending ideas of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, sought total determination of every nuance of a piece through mathematical calculations; others, exploring various chance and indeterminate techniques, wanted to eliminate the will and emotion of the composer. But all seemed to be moving away from mainstream audiences, and for the second time in thirty years the American musical landscape changed drastically.Footnote 2
Contrary to the myth, the twelve-tone serial enterprise in the United States has had a high degree of continuity from the indigenous ultra-modern movement centered around Cowell in the late 1920s and early 1930s, through the arrival of Schoenberg and other European émigrés in the 1930s, and continuing with music written during and immediately after the war by Riegger, Babbitt, Perle, Weber, and others. The flowering of twelve-tone activity in the 1950s has its roots in these earlier efforts, and continues them without significant break. The myth of serial origins seems to arise from a conflation of the American and European experiences. The European serialists, known loosely as the Darmstadt School, spoke often of a need to start the musical world anew, to make a fresh beginning.Footnote 3 In the United States, however, there was no sense of creation out of the ruins, no sense of a radical new beginning, no “zero hour.” Rather, American musical activity, including twelve-tone compositional activity, shows a striking degree of coherence and continuity before, during, and after the war.
The first phase of serialism in the United States unfolded largely under the banner of Cowell's New Music enterprises, including performances, publications, and recordings.Footnote 4 What serial music there was in the 1920s and 1930s was published, performed, and discussed in media sponsored by Cowell. The small group of ultra-modern composers gathered around Cowell (Weiss, Riegger, Ruggles, Crawford) adopted Schoenberg's twelve-tone method because it intersected and amplified some of their own concerns, including a linear/contrapuntal approach to music (reacting against a Romantic texture of melody and chords) and a commitment to “dissonance” (in Charles Seeger's broad terms). They wanted to write “dissonant counterpoint,” and Schoenberg's method, as they chose to understand it, permitted them to do so.Footnote 5
Adolph Weiss (1891–1971). Weiss was an important source for information about Schoenberg's method, both through his personal contacts and a published article, at a time when scores, performances, recordings, and written information were virtually unavailable.Footnote 6 Weiss's own twelve-tone music follows Schoenberg in relying on pairs or quartets of row forms to define a “tonic” harmonic area and in frequent repetition of short, recognizable motives.
Wallingford Riegger (1885–1961). In the 1920s, Riegger was already composing rugged, dissonant, atonal music in what was emerging as a shared ultra-modern style, but he became increasingly interested in the possibilities of the twelve-tone method. In 1932, he completed his first piece that can be described as twelve-tone in significant respects (Dichotomy), and thereafter most of his instrumental music was serial at least in part. In Riegger's twelve-tone music, the series (there is often more than one, and they do not always include all twelve notes) are usually treated as melodic lines, specific as to pitch and contour. Typically, these serial melodies are combined with non-serial pitch structures, either as distinct strands in a polyphonic fabric or as distinct sections within a movement.
Carl Ruggles (1876–1971). For Ruggles, the overriding compositional goal was to write sustained, non-triadic melodic lines that could be combined polyphonically; in short, to write effective dissonant counterpoint. His only overt attempt to incorporate Schoenberg's twelve-tone method—his piano piece, Evocations II—uses two series, one of twelve notes and the other of nine. The series permit him both to write the kind of dissonant melodic lines and dissonant counterpoint he favored and, by projecting motives drawn from the series over larger time spans, to control the large-scale design of the work as well.
Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901–53). Many of Crawford's compositions involve precompositional schemes, some of them explicitly serial.Footnote 7 Her particular brand of serialism involves systematic, virtually mechanistic, patterns of rotation and transposition, designed to project the same musical ideas simultaneously at various levels of structure. Crawford may have been drawn to serialism for the same reasons that Ruggles was: it represented an intensification of her prior commitment to “dissonated” melody—i.e., melody that avoids pitch repetitions and triadic arpeggiations—and it made possible a multi-level musical structure. In addition, when juxtaposed with a free, non-serial melody, it permitted her to create a radical stratification of the musical texture into two distinct and contrasting layers, a “heterophonic” texture that was itself a basic element of the ultra-modern aesthetic.
The rise of Nazism in Germany caused many intellectuals to flee Europe for safe haven in the United States. This influx of immigrants included prominent twelve-tone composers, including Krenek, Wolpe, Eisler, Erich Itor Kahn, and, of course, Schoenberg himself.Footnote 8 When they arrived, they were able to make contact with American ultra-modern composers, to the mutual benefit of guests and hosts. After the Second World War ended, the European immigrants largely remained in the United States, where they were able to provide context and continuity for a new generation of twelve-tone composers.
Schoenberg arrived in New York in 1933 (he was among the first musicians to realize the implications of the Nazi rise to power) and immediately began teaching at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston.Footnote 9 His assistant and interpreter there was his former student Adolph Weiss, and through Weiss, Schoenberg solidified his ties to the circle of ultra-modern composers around Cowell and to Cowell himself. Cowell and Weiss were important intermediaries for Schoenberg throughout his American stay.Footnote 10 Schoenberg's arrival was celebrated by Cowell in print and served to energize the musical avant-garde in the United States.Footnote 11
Krenek, who settled in the United States in 1938, also had a significant and immediate impact on the course of twelve-tone composition. During the war and after, Krenek continued to compose a steady stream of innovative twelve-tone music. He also lectured widely and published several accounts of twelve-tone composition—for most American composers, these writings were among their principal sources of information.Footnote 12
Like Schoenberg, Wolpe left Germany in 1933, but took a more circuitous route to the United States. He went first to Vienna, where he studied with Webern for four months and began to write twelve-tone music. He then lived in Palestine for several years before settling in New York in 1938. During his New York years, he immersed himself in the new-music scene, as a composer of his own personal brand of twelve-tone music, as a colleague (he maintained close personal connections with Milton Babbitt, among others), and as a teacher (his students included Ralph Shapey and Ursula Mamlok). As with Schoenberg and Krenek, Wolpe's presence and influence assured that the United States would be the home to an unbroken tradition of twelve-tone composition spanning across the war years.
Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951). Schoenberg's “American” twelve-tone music including the Violin Concerto (1936), Piano Concerto (1942), Ode to Napoleon (1942), String Trio (1946), Survivor from Warsaw (1947), and Violin Phantasy (1949) generally reveals a greater comprehensibility and simplicity of approach, an increased interest in explicit tonal and triadic references, and a growing tendency towards treating the hexachord, rather than the twelve-tone row, as the basic generating shape.Footnote 13 Partitional schemes (i.e., inventive divisions of the series into usable chunks), continuing hallmarks of Schoenberg's approach, assure that the row is not generally expressed as an explicit melodic theme, but functions rather as a source of materials. Hexachordal inversional combinatoriality continues to be of central interest, but is as much a way of creating doublings and reinforcements of all kinds as a way of creating aggregates of all twelve pitch-classes.
Ernst Krenek (1900–91). From 1931 through the end of his long creative life, Krenek composed twelve-tone music from a variety of angles. With Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae (1942), Krenek devised a distinctive form of twelve-tone modality, one that influenced much of his subsequent work. It involves composing a twelve-tone series that moves primarily by melodic steps, dividing it into two hexachords, and rotating and/or transposing the hexachords independently. Each hexachord, in its original or its rotated and/or transposed form, functions not as an ordered theme or motive, but rather as a mode from which characteristic shapes could be drawn. The result is a kind of twelve-tone music that can easily imitate Renaissance polyphony and which only exceptionally produces aggregates of all twelve notes.
Stefan Wolpe (1902–72). Wolpe's music characteristically depends on an underlying twelve-tone series that controls both the order in which the entire aggregate is gradually explored and the smaller pitch-class fields drawn from it. Because of the slow unfolding of the total chromatic over the course of a section or piece, Wolpe often works with collections smaller than the complete aggregate, usually groupings of four, five, or six notes (which he refers to as “pitch constellations”).Footnote 14 Form for Piano (1959) marks the beginning of Wolpe's final compositional period, one in which he abandoned Schoenbergian developing variation for “the principle of the conjunction of opposites.”Footnote 15 Wolpe's later works, though twelve-tone at a deep level, present surprising, unpredictable juxtapositions of contrasting material: the music's governing principle is juxtaposition rather than development; it is more spatial than linear in conception.
The continued activity of ultra-modern composers (especially Riegger), European émigrés (especially Schoenberg, Krenek, and Wolpe), and a younger generation of American-born composers (especially Perle, Babbitt, and Ben Weber) assured an impressive quantity and quality of twelve-tone activity in the United States throughout the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. The continuous tradition of twelve-tone composition, stretching from Weiss's return in 1927 to the outpouring of twelve-tone activity in the 1950s and 1960s stands in marked contrast to the situation in Europe, where the loss of many leading composers together with the severe impact of the war created the conditions for a more radical break with the past.
Myth No. 2: The Myth of Integral Serialism
The myth of integral serialism maintains that in the postwar period, American twelve-tone composers, like their European counterparts, sought ways of serializing musical domains other than pitch.
[The serialists] adopted and extended Schoenberg's concept of the tone row to all musical parameters. . . . Postwar followers of Schoenberg applied serial technique to rhythm, dynamics, and even timbres as well as pitch, often using complex, advanced mathematical procedures. The movement toward total serialism, as it was known, occurred on both sides of the Atlantic.Footnote 16
The Integral Serialism of the Fifties could hardly last forever, though at the time it seemed to have qualities of permanence and durability which were beyond question. . . . Yet well within a decade, in Europe at least, the system had already fallen into decline, and though its structures may still be used today, they have long ceased to be the mainstream technique they once were. . . . It would seem that in the U.S.A., however, under the influence of Milton Babbitt, integral serialism continues to flourish, in the East Coast universities and with composers of the middle generation.Footnote 17
As with the myth of serial origins, the myth of integral serialism results from an erroneous conflation of the European and American experiences. Most American twelve-tone composers during the 1950s and 1960s and beyond, although they were often interested in exploring new rhythmic possibilities (as were many of their non-twelve-tone counterparts), have shown little interest in serialization of rhythm in any meaningful sense.
In systematically serializing rhythm, Babbitt is the exception, not the rule. In his early work (dating from late 1940s and 1950s), Babbitt used “duration rows” to shape the rhythmic domain. Typically, Babbitt assigned numbers to the pitch classes of his series (counted in semitones of distance from the first note of the series) and then realized those numbers as durations (measured in any convenient rhythmic unit). Later, beginning around 1960, Babbitt found what he considered a more profound analogy between pitch and rhythm in his “time-point system.”Footnote 18 With both duration rows and time-point rows, Babbitt wanted to project the same musical ideas simultaneously in the pitch and rhythmic domains. This approach differs sharply from the Darmstadt procedure of serializing the different musical domains separately, by creating one row for the pitches and another for the rhythms.Footnote 19
Babbitt realized early on that pitch and rhythm were uniquely susceptible to structuring and that other musical dimensions could be used to assist in projecting pitch structures and rhythmic structures. I am not aware of any attempt by any American twelve-tone composer to serialize dynamics, timbre, or any other musical dimension. In rejecting the desirability or even the possibility of European-style “integral serialism,” Mel Powell observed:
The first step was simply to apply to the other dimensions, for example, twelve durational values, twelve dynamic levels, etc. Of course the underlying absurdity was soon discovered by everyone. In my own case it was a very simple matter of consulting a logician friend of mine who pointed out that the idea of correlating a finite set, which is defined by octave equivalence, with an infinite set (and indeed with a set which did not even have discrete “objective” gradations, such as dynamics) was not the swiftest thinking in town.Footnote 20
American composers have generally not been interested in European-style integral serialism or in the structuring of dynamics, articulation, or timbre. Even with regard to rhythm, which is in principle more susceptible to structuring, American composers other than Babbitt have shown little interest.Footnote 21
Historians of postwar American music are right to pay considerable attention to Babbitt: his music is a remarkable achievement and, together with his teaching and writing, has given him well-deserved recognition and influence. But Babbitt should not be considered the primary representative of twelve-tone serialism, or even one extreme of a continuum. Rather, he is a twelve-tone world unto himself, and concentrated study of his music reveals how distinctive and original it is. The myth of integral serialism thus rests not only on the error of conflating the European and American experiences but also on the error of taking Babbitt's highly individual practice as typical of American twelve-tone writing.
Milton Babbitt (1916–). Babbitt's music is generally not based on a single row and its transformations (transpositions, inversions, retrogrades, retrograde-inversion), but rather on slowly mutating arrays that consist of four or more row forms unfolded simultaneously. In his first compositional period (1947–61), Babbitt uses trichordal arrays—two pairs of combinatorially related derived series—often in conjunction with duration rows. In his second compositional period (1964–80), he uses all-partition arrays—using all possible partitions of an aggregate into a given number of parts—often in conjunction with time-point arrays. In his third compositional period (1981 to the present), he uses super arrays, in which two or more trichordal or all-partition arrays are unfolded simultaneously.Footnote 22
George Perle (1915–). In 1939, while studying with Krenek, Perle began to create a distinctive system of “twelve-tone tonality” within which he has composed ever since. In this system, Perle creates arrays by conjoining cycles of intervals (i.e., sequential transposition of a note by a single interval). Harmonies are drawn from arrays as slices of varying degrees of thickness, typically encompassing four or six notes. Within the harmonies, pitch classes may be doubled. No particular order is specified for the notes within a harmony or among the harmonies. This is twelve-tone music in which the aggregate is constantly present in the background, as a by-product of the interval cycles, but rarely on the musical surface.
Roger Sessions (1896–1985). Through the late 1940s and early 1950s, Sessions became increasingly interested in twelve-tone approaches and the ways in which they dovetailed with his well-known interest in counterpoint, “the large gesture” and “the long line,” structural depth, and motivic coherence.Footnote 23 In Sessions's serial music, encompassing nearly everything he wrote beginning with the Violin Sonata (1953), the series often functions as a deep source of motivic and intervallic relations rather than as a literal theme—sometimes the series is easily traced on the surface of the music; other times it recedes underground.
Aaron Copland (1900–90). Four of Copland's late works can be considered twelve-tone—the Piano Quartet (1950), the Piano Fantasy (1957), Connotations (1962), and Inscape (1967). In varying ways, these works project what Copland called a “freely interpreted tonalism.”Footnote 24 That is, Copland's twelve-tone approach permitted him to synthesize the extended harmonic possibilities of aggregate-based music with a persistent interest in traditional tonal devices and sonorities.
Myth No. 3: The Myth of Serial Tyranny
The myth of serial tyranny maintains that serial composition dominated the American art music scene during the 1950s and 1960s, and that twelve-tone composers were more likely than others to secure academic positions, receive grants and awards, and to have their music published, performed, recorded, and reviewed.Footnote 25
In July of 1921, after crafting his first twelve-tone row, Schoenberg had written, “Today I have discovered something which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.” By the late 1950s, Schoenberg's claim had come to seem prophetic, for from that point twelve-tone music dominated what was “acceptably modernistic” in American music for a full quarter-century. America's neoclassic movement, the wing that followed Stravinsky rather than Schoenberg, had a short-lived success, its achievements all but obliterated by the hegemony of twelve-tone music after 1955.Footnote 26
The serialists were fascists, and with the appointment of Boulez to the post as conductor of the New York Philharmonic [in 1971], we knew it was all over for composers of my style.Footnote 27
Forty years ago [i.e., 1964] the serialists held the greatest intimidating force in the small world of modern composition; then there was a terrific rebellion against many of its assumptions—I was certainly part of that rebellion—and now it is OK to attack all serialists, indeed all the new music of the period roughly between 1950 and 1975.Footnote 28
[In 1982, I was] locked in a battle with what I came to call “the complicated music gang.” These, of course, were the “uptown” guys, the atonal composers—Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, and the rest—who dominated contemporary classical music in New York, and influenced a good share of the funding, commissions, and faculty appointments that composers might get, anywhere in America.Footnote 29
Yet no matter what the statistics, it is hard to deny a prevailing mood in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. Whether fact or fantasy, a sense that serialists somehow had spread a reign of terror pervaded the compositional world, and practically all young composers and many established ones felt almost helpless in the grip of a serial tyranny. Testimony is overwhelming that composers who did not wish to write serial music felt intimidated and thwarted in their careers, be it positions in academia, prizes, or performances. As a consequence almost every major composer who came of age from the late 1950s to the '70s felt compelled to at least attempt serialism, regardless of leanings and preferences.Footnote 30
Empirical study establishes that there was, in fact, no serial tyranny in the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 31 Jobs, grants, awards, publications, performances, recordings, and reviews went to twelve-tone composers roughly in proportion to their numbers within the larger population of composers (around 15%). Even if twelve-tone composers and free atonal composers are conflated into a single category, their post-tonal orientation is represented a distinct minority of the time in the economy of postwar American music. The claim that twelve-tone composers, even if not actually dominant, were nonetheless perceived to be dominant during the 1950s and 1960s is also false. Authoritative descriptions of contemporary music in that period, offered by historians, journalists, and the composers themselves, generally agree that twelve-tone composition was only one option among many, and by no means a dominant one.Footnote 32
In the United States, right now, it would be tragic if there were no group to continue to present both here and abroad the most advanced and competent works. This is a weak and powerless group in relation to American society, but many of our best composers, such as Sessions, Ives, Varése, Kahn, and Leon Kirchner, belong to it.Footnote 33 (1955)
Twenty years ago the small handful of courageous composers who cultivated Arnold Schoenberg's “method of composing with twelve tones” would certainly have found their proper place among the very advanced guard of the Experimentalists. Today, thirty years after Schoenberg completed his first compositions systematically employing the twelve-tone technique, the latter may be said to have definitely outgrown the stage of laboratory experimentation and to have become one of the main trends of musical composition in the twentieth century.Footnote 34 (1955)
The eternal quarrel between what is “esoteric” and what “popular” has evolved into a quite urbane, almost friendly argument between diatonicism and chromaticism, the tonalists and the atonalists, or with overtones resounding from a very recent past, between neoclassicism and the twelve-tone music. We are probably in a period of calm before new storms.Footnote 35 (1956)
How will the Nineteen Fifties shape up in music history? . . . In composition the most pervasive current flowed toward consolidation . . . . Increasingly composers sought to find individual ways to adapt serial techniques to their own style. . . . While the consolidators were at work, the experimenters were busier than ever. They took off in various directions, notably into the field of electronics . . . . The pursuit of more traditional composing methods continued.Footnote 36 (1959)
Through the whole decade of the 1950s, I can find not one single published account of serial or twelve-tone domination.
Beginning around 1962, contemporary accounts do describe a twelve-tone domination, but only retrospectively, as something that was true during the 1950s but is true no longer. That is, serial tyranny went directly from being unperceived to being over, and contemporary accounts of the musical scene in the 1960s continue to emphasize a plurality of compositional styles.
Up to only the last five years or so, an aggressive type of dissonant modernism was very much the style, whether Schoenbergian dodecaphony or Milhaudian polytonality. The twelve-tone school was by far the most important, and as time goes on, it seems more and more certain that it was a withering influence. . . . There also are indications that the twelve-tone hold, especially the Webern craze, has spent its force.Footnote 37 (1962)
Right now the youngsters are experimenting like mad. Orthodox serialism is out. Style rather than content is the rage, the musical equivalents of op and pop. Tonality is not as dead as it seems; and, anyway, the composers who abjure tonality are but a tiny percentage of living composers.Footnote 38 (1965)
In America there was little continuity between the 19th-century German tradition and the various classicisms of the 1920s and '30s, but these latter were spreading and flourishing vigorously in the 1950s and '60s.Footnote 39 (1966)
The same pattern—a serial tyranny described as part of the past, a plurality of styles observed in the present—continues through the last quarter of the twentieth century and right up to the present. As the myth of serial tyranny hardens into conventional wisdom, observers all agree that twelve-tone composers dominated the musical scene at one time, but there is no agreement at all on precisely when that domination began and when it ended.
In the 1950s and 1960s, although twelve-tone composition was not a dominant force or perceived to be a dominant force, it was certainly a vigorous presence. There are a number of reasons why twelve-tone composition, previously the domain primarily of the fringe ultra-modern composers and a small group of European émigrés, should enter the compositional mainstream in the postwar United States, all of which have been suggested in previous literature on the subject. The reasons would certainly include the persistent cultural prestige of Europe and the European musical tradition, including its most recent developments; the star power of major twelve-tone composers like Stravinsky, Copland, and Sessions; the prestige of science in the postwar United States, which may to some extent have enhanced the appeal of a compositional method that appeared scientific and rational; cold war politics (twelve-tone music appeared to some to be a way of countering Soviet-style Socialist Realism); intrinsic appeal (the twelve-tone approach offered composers a way of thinking systematically about the twelve tones); and the capricious and therefore mysterious workings of fashion.
An accurate and nuanced account of twelve-tone composition in the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond must account for the upsurge in interest without succumbing to mythmaking and the overheated language that has accompanied it. In the postwar United States, a large number of composers, including those widely acknowledged as preeminent, wrote a wide variety of twelve-tone musical styles. The musical scene was thus remarkably diverse, both among the different available approaches and within them. But through it all, twelve-tone serialism remained only one option among many.
George Rochberg (1918–2005). Rochberg is probably best known today for his abandonment and critique of twelve-tone music; in some ways, Rochberg's move away from twelve-tone composition had an impact comparable to Stravinsky's and Copland's move towards it: a landmark in a long-standing cultural discussion. However, for roughly ten years, from the Twelve Bagatelles for Piano (1952) to the String Quartet no. 2 (completed in 1961), Rochberg was a committed composer of vibrant and distinctive twelve-tone music. Most characteristically, Rochberg brought to the serial enterprise his own ideas about the “spatialization” of music: the series (or a group of series forms) is used to articulate a self-contained musical shape, which is positioned with respect to other self-contained shapes in the manner of a mobile or a collage.Footnote 40
Ross Lee Finney (1906–97). Finney became a twelve-tone composer in the early 1950s and walked the serial road in one way or another for the remainder of his long career. One of the most distinctive features of Finney's twelve-tone music is its persistent sense of tonal center: “Now my music always was and still is tonal. Even my twelve-tone music is tonal.”Footnote 41 Finney used the term “complementarity” to refer to the integration of twelve-tone and tonal approaches: the local successions would be governed by twelve-tone relations, but the large-scale organization would be defined by a succession of centric pitch classes, that is, of tonal tonics.
Ursula Mamlok (1928–). Mamlok has been a twelve-tone composer since her studies with Wolpe and Shapey in the early 1960s: “I'm very comfortable writing 12-tone music but you will hear composers say, ‘That's passé.' That's the same as saying the C Major scale is passé—you can't go by that, you have to have your own language.”Footnote 42 Mamlok's twelve-tone language has often involved either taking unusual paths through the familiar twelve-by-twelve matrix (including spiraling inward in narrowing concentric squares) or in devising original charts and arrays involving multiple series forms or hexachords alone. In either case, her twelve-tone music is rich in motivic repetition and cross-reference.
Roque Cordero (1917–). Born in Panama and immersed in Panamanian folk music, Cordero spent most of his professional life in the United States. He began to compose twelve-tone music in the mid-1940s, while studying with Krenek. His twelve-tone style is largely contrapuntal with constant doubling, repetition, and imitation between the parts: “I had to integrate technical elements from Europe which I learned from Ernst Krenek. . . . I am not necessarily quoting from the Panamanian folk song because I have very seldom quoted directly from Panamanian folk song, but I do use rhythmic elements and some melodic design that can be found there without being any one in particular.”Footnote 43
Myth No. 4: The Myth of Serial Demise
The myth of serial demise holds that at some point (writers disagree about the actual date), either the mythical serial tyranny ended or composers simply stopped composing twelve-tone music altogether.
I have written elsewhere that I expected the latter half of this century to witness the consolidation of our century's innovations into an amalgamated twentieth-century style. . . . Everybody successful or establishment-minded writes music now, diatonic or chromatic, with a thickish overlay of dissonance, and since 1950 with a decreasing dependence on serial continuities.Footnote 44
The discovery and dissemination of the music of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg created the predominant musical language of the 1950s. . . . Many composers, both old and young, experienced or tyros, turned to serial composition in the 1950s. . . . In spite of its popularity and the feeling held by many that dodecaphony would be a prevailing idiom for many decades, it did not retain its importance in the following years. In an interview reported by the New York Times on December 6, 1964, Igor Stravinsky declared that “Card-carrying 12-toners are practically extinct.”Footnote 45
Though preeminent until the 1960s, twelve-tone music has since disappeared—or, perhaps, been banished—from the musical scene.Footnote 46
[A] backlash against Serialism arose in the 1970s, and there was soon a profusion of Minimalists and neo-Romantics. Amid this new post-modernist diversity, Serialism faded in power and prestige.Footnote 47
[T]he seeming breakdown of the total serialist order in the past few years [i.e., the late 1970s], and of the Northeastern oligarchy that propagated that hegemony in his country.Footnote 48
There is a general consensus that the Uptown scene began to lose steam in the mid-1980s with the defection of many younger composers from any allegiance to 12-tone technique.Footnote 49
During the 1970's,. . . [s]erialism, extreme dissonance, and mathematically derived “spots on the page” had become so entrenched that it seemed there was no turning back. But a backlash did come, and by 1983 the vogue for big tonal pieces had become so pervasive that the New York Philharmonic was able to present a series of concerts of music by John Harbison, David Del Tredici, Bernard Rands, John Adams and others under the provocative title “A New Romanticism?”Footnote 50
Yet Schoenberg's serial atonality soon became a trans-Atlantic orthodoxy, which has only recently [i.e., the 1990s] collapsed.Footnote 51
The experience to which [Elliott] Carter's music gives authoritative access is that of belonging to a self-congratulating coterie, lately [i.e., the 1990s] beside itself with rage at its loss of power to tyrannize the classical music community.Footnote 52
Despite the myth, important and engaging serial music has continued to be written in the United States by major composers up to the present day. I propose that the history of American twelve-tone music spans three overlapping phases in a continuous and still living tradition. The first phase (from the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s) belongs to the ultra-modern composers and the European émigré composers, working to some degree in mutual awareness and personal contact. The second phase (from the mid-1940s to the late 1970s) embraces a full range of twelve-tone activity as a significant number of older composers began to explore the approach while an even larger group of younger composers emerged within the twelve-tone tradition. Despite the myth of serial demise, there has been a significant third phase of US twelve-tone composition, spanning from roughly 1980 to the present.
In 1981, Milton Babbitt arrived at what Andrew Mead calls his “Grand Synthesis” and began composing with “superarrays.”Footnote 53 This initiated a long period of sustained compositional activity that continues to the present moment. Since 1981, Babbitt has written more music, received more prestigious awards, and had more performances from major ensembles and soloists than he ever did during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1980, with Night Fantasies, Elliott Carter, who had long been concerned with the systematic partitioning of the twelve-note aggregate, began composing with twelve-tone series, but ordered in space rather than time—the series is now a chord rather than a melody.Footnote 54 Many of his works since 1980 involve not just one resulting twelve-note chord, but extended successions of such chords.
After a period of composing a rather free kind of twelve-tone music, in which a series might provide a point of departure rather than a persistent thematic presence, Ralph Shapey began in 1981 to rely on a special kind of twelve-tone array he called “The Mother Lode,” and virtually all of his subsequent works are based on it.Footnote 55 For Charles Wuorinen, the early 1980s marked both a reorientation of his twelve-tone style towards a somewhat simplified musical surface and more transparent organization around audible pitch centers as well as the composition of an impressive group of large-scale orchestral compositions. During the previous decade, Perle had significantly expanded his system of “twelve-tone tonality,” and this compositional approach has sustained his compositional activity through the subsequent decades.Footnote 56 At about the same time, Gunther Schuller settled on the twelve-tone row that he has used in all of his subsequent compositions, more than forty of them in varying media and styles. All of these major composers found new ways of writing twelve-tone music around 1980 and all have continued composing twelve-tone music up to the present moment.
While these established composers were recommitting themselves to the twelve-tone enterprise, a younger generation of twelve-tone composers came to maturity. Joseph Schwantner (b. 1943) received the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for the twelve-tone Aftertones of Infinity, and he has continued to compose aggregate-based music. The twelve-tone Concerto for Piano (1980) of Peter Lieberson (b. 1946) was premiered by Peter Serkin and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1983; Lieberson, too, has continued to write his own version of twelve-tone music since. Many other twelve-tone composers came of age in the 1970s and '80s and have continued to write twelve-tone music at least until recent years, including Jonathan Dawe, Louis Karchin, Andrew Mead, Robert Morris, Jeff Nichols, David Smalley, Judd Danby, and Dan Welcher. By 1980, twelve-tone serialism was no longer considered fashionable, but major American composers, joined by a small but vigorous group from a rising generation of American composers, were rededicating themselves to the enterprise and discovering new compositional possibilities within it.
It would be tempting to say that the myth of serial demise derives from an erroneous conflation of the American and European experiences. The conventional wisdom is that the European avant-garde composers associated with Darmstadt practiced their radical brand of integral serialism for only a few years and then turned elsewhere (mostly to indeterminacy and electronic media). Many have assumed that the American experience involved a similar flare-up and burn-out, which is not at all the case. The most recent scholarship, however, shows that in Europe, as in the United States, serial demise is a myth. Indeed, the Darmstadt composers and other members of the European postwar avant-garde (including Boulez, Henze, Maderna, Berio, and Nono) continued to write twelve-tone serial music of one kind or another well beyond 1960, indeed through the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond.Footnote 57
Twelve-tone music was certainly out of fashion by around 1980. But to ignore the past thirty years of twelve-tone music by Babbitt, Carter, Wuorinen, Shapey, Martino, and very many others is to falsify the history of postwar American music. Virtually every historical account of postwar American music discusses twelve-tone and serial music as a phenomenon unique to the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 58 This approach makes for a streamlined narrative but for poor history.
Charles Wuorinen (1938–). One of the most distinctive features of Wuorinen's approach to twelve-tone composition is what he calls a “time-point system.”Footnote 59 This system seeks an integration of pitch and rhythm by basing both on the same series. Furthermore, it seeks an integration of the rhythmic organization of a work, from its immediate surface rhythms, through its phrases, up through the large formal sections. Wuorinen's multi-level conception of the serial organization brings in its wake a strong sense of orientation towards specific pitches, and this interest in pitch centricity is a persistent feature of all of Wuorinen's music.
Donald Martino (1931–2005). In Martino's conception, each section of a piece will have its own distinctive twelve-tone design, with defining intervals, trichords, tetrachords, hexachords, and twelve-tone series. The sections can then be concatenated as links in a larger chain, with each link simultaneously responsive to the previous links and predictive of future ones: “It wasn't until three years later, in my Piano Fantasy of 1958 that I stumbled for the first time upon a sort of useful procedure for me, which had to do with combining a set with one of its transformations to produce another set.”Footnote 60 In Martino's music, there may be many different series, and these need not be explicit on the musical surface. Rather than guaranteeing unity, the rows provide a guide through a universe of relationships within the aggregate of twelve pitch classes.Footnote 61
Ralph Shapey (1921–2002). Shapey became a twelve-tone composer in the late 1950s, but both his aesthetic orientation and compositional practice owe more to Varése, whose music he championed as a conductor, and to Wolpe, with whom he studied, than to Schoenberg. Shapey rejects Schoenbergian developing variation in favor of a music based on static sonorous objects deployed in musical space: “In my music, the initial space-time image generates through expansion of itself all textures and a structural totality. Through permutation of this image I continue, rather than destroy, its state of being. I work with the concept of ‘it is’ instead of the traditional it becomes.'. . . The ‘image’ must create and sustain the unforgettable moment.”Footnote 62 Shapey began in 1981 to rely on a special kind of twelve-tone array he called “The Mother Lode,” which is precisely the kind of “image” he has in mind—a structure that can “create and sustain” contrasting musical moments.
Robert Morris (1943–). One of Robert Morris's most productive concepts is that of “compositional design,” which he defines as “an array of pitch-classes ready to be realized as music. . . . Such designs are not identical to or substitutes for ‘precompositional plans’ or sketches although they may play a part in the early planning of a composition before one begins the first draft. Compositional designs are more akin to figured bass in Baroque continuo parts or the chord symbols used in lead sheets in jazz, in that such notations guide both composition and improvisation but, once mastered, do not, directly or indirectly, influence stylistic and personal choice.”Footnote 63
Joseph Schwantner (1943–). In Joseph Schwantner's twelve-tone music, the series is more a point of departure than a thematic presence on the musical surface. He uses it as a source of intervallic and motivic materials. In his works from the 1970s, he uses partitioning schemes to derive new series forms, which are then treated in the same improvisatory manner as the original one. More recently, he has incorporated more tonal references (including tonal centers) and more emphasis on colorful harmonic stasis and overt repetition, while maintaining a structural interest in the twelve pitch-class aggregate.Footnote 64
Myth No. 5: The Myth of the Academic Serialist
The myth of the academic serialist maintains that serialism was bred in the university, with its emphasis on rational inquiry, that serial composers have dominated the university, and that serial composers did not fare well outside the university.
Lacking a concert audience, Serialism found a home in the academic world. At the conservatories, composers had a haven where they could teach the strict rules of Serialism, write bristling works to be played by ensembles connected with the school . . . and wait for the day when the rest of the world would catch up.Footnote 65
The serialists were particularly adept at securing support from [foundations], not the least because they also found an even more powerful and viable base of patronage. They discovered academia and bent it to their purposes. The rational, scientific orientation of the serialist composer easily overcame any vestigial uneasiness other academics might have about the legitimacy of the composer in a university setting. This orientation also allowed the composer to speak the language of foundation grants, and a natural alignment soon developed among the composer, the foundations, and universities. The composer found a secure place and a power that he never before had. Through his position in academia, he could go after the riches of the foundations, while at the same time his position in academia certified him as an expert adviser to the foundations themselves. He could not only secure money but have significant impact on how that money was distributed. Never before had the composer had so much control over his own destiny. Or, more accurately, never before had a handful of composers so much power over what was written.Footnote 66
Serialism's most publicly aggressive proponents, early and late, presented and still present it as the only true faith. As such, they have proclaimed an orthodox cultural church, with its hierarchy, gospels, beliefs and anathemas. After the end of World War II, it very quickly captured and dominated American academic circles, which it monstrously and bluntly politicized.Footnote 67
Nowadays, a revisionist campaign is under way arguing that the “great split” [between twelve-tone and tonal composers] was hugely overstated. The 12-tone commando squad never commanded anything during the fractious, much maligned 1960s, the line goes. True, the squad was uninterested in composers writing tonal music, but it did not condemn them, and certainly never controlled them. Don't you believe it. I was there, studying music at Yale, and the Serialists ran the place, as well as other composition departments at major universities. They made the appointments, granted the tenure, recruited the composition students.Footnote 68
At first, universities put up a horrified resistance to twelve-tone technique, calling it mathematics rather than music. But, once inside the door, the twelve-tone composers found their work so well-suited for classroom explication that the university became their haven.Footnote 69
In fact, twelve-tone serialism in the United States originated outside the academy and has flourished outside it. Twelve-tone composers were no more likely than other composers to find a creative home in the university, and the university was no more disposed to welcome them than composers of other orientations. Indeed, twelve-tone composers often found the university notably inhospitable.
Twelve-tone composition in the United States has its roots outside of the university, in the prewar activities of the ultra-modern composers. When the émigrés began streaming in from Europe, some found at least temporary homes in American college and universities (Schoenberg at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California, Krenek at Vassar College and Hamline University), but most (like Wolpe and Stravinsky) did not. And even those who did can hardly be said to have been nurtured there.
When twelve-tone composition began to blossom in this country in the 1950s and 1960s—what I have called the second wave of twelve-tone music in the US—a significant amount of activity did take place within the university, as part of a large-scale trend that affected composers of all orientations, but many of the most important twelve-tone composers, then and now, never had any long-standing university affiliation. During that period, the two most prominent composers in the US who wrote twelve-tone music were probably Stravinsky and Copland. Other composers of twelve-tone music active in the period, including Riegger and Weber, similarly avoided any academic connection. Leonard Rosenman, a former student of Schoenberg's, became a prominent Hollywood composer and wrote the first twelve-tone film score (The Cobweb, dir. Vincente Minelli, 1955). More recently, in what I am calling the third serial wave, Carter and Lieberson have had only fleeting university connections. Furthermore, a significant number of twelve-tone composers who have earned a living by teaching have done so in the conservatory rather than the university—I am thinking, for example, of Gunther Schuller (New England Conservatory) and Ursula Mamlok (Manhattan School of Music). All of these composers are non-academic serialists. Their number and their prominence suggest strongly that one could be (and still can be) a serial composer without being a university composer. Despite claims that serial composers dominated the academy during the 1950s and 1960s, a simple statistical check shows that at no time did serial composers alone or even serial composers together with atonal composers constitute a majority of composers in academia. Indeed, serial composers were probably no more than roughly one-fifth of active university composers at any time.Footnote 70
The myth of the academic serialist is an offshoot of the reality of the academic composer. In the postwar period in America, the university became the principal patron of the art music tradition, a phenomenon that has been widely observed.Footnote 71 But it by no means follows that serial composers were more likely to enter the university than composers with other orientations, provided the music was in the classical mainstream. During the 1950s and 1960s, that mainstream included more serial composers than ever before, but it also encompassed a broad range of tonally oriented styles. Since that period, with the waning of critical interest in twelve-tone music, the university has remained the principal patron of non-commercial music in the classical tradition, encompassing a wide variety of styles. There is nothing intrinsically academic about serialism, and nothing especially serial about academic music departments, then or now.
Twelve-tone composers, like all kinds of composers, entered the university during and after World War II, but the notion that they found life there particularly congenial is belied by the experiences of many. Ernst Krenek, for example, had secured a position at Vassar College in 1939, but was fired in 1942 because, in the words of George Sherman Dickinson, the chair of the music department, “the specialized aspect of contemporary music which you so enthusiastically and forcibly represent has little place in the curriculum of an undergraduate college such as Vassar.”Footnote 72 The dismissal of Martino from Yale in 1966 and Wuorinen from Columbia in 1971, at the height of the presumptive “serial tyranny,” suggests that Dickinson's attitude may have been more widespread, and more powerfully in control, than has been widely acknowledged. Babbitt has described the university as “our last hope, our only hope, and ergo our best hope,”Footnote 73 but has frequently found that hope to be far from fully realized.Footnote 74
It has often been asserted that there was an especially good fit between twelve-tone composers and universities that valued the rational, the scientific, and the quantitative:
A compositional style that was (or appeared) rational, objective, and quantifiable, or at least rooted in complex mathematical manipulation, seemed more appropriate in a university setting than a more angst-ridden, personal emotional expressivity, or a pounding, primitive-sounding repetitive style.Footnote 75
But though universities may have liked rationality, science, and mathematics in general, they did not necessarily value them as attributes of music or composers of music. Indeed, the twelve-tone musical style and, even more, the technical language that some composers used to describe it, were not notably applauded or rewarded within the university system. Twelve-tone composers were never more likely to get academic positions, promotions, awards and grants, or other kinds of academic goodies than other composers.Footnote 76 The academy neither encouraged them nor rewarded them in any special way.
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971). In the early phase of his life as a serial composer, beginning in 1952, Stravinsky composed with series, usually of fewer than twelve tones, that consisted of diatonic material, and produced a distinctive brand of “diatonic serialism.” Beginning in 1960, with the composition of Movements, Stravinsky began to compose with the rotational arrays that characterize all of his subsequent work and represent his most distinctive contribution to twelve-tone music. To create these arrays, Stravinsky takes four forms of a twelve-tone series (P, I, R, and RI), divides each into its two hexachords, and then rotates and transposes each hexachord independently in the manner of Krenek. He draws melodies from the rows of the array and harmonies from its columns. The resulting music thus draws its material from twelve-tone series, but presents a musical surface rich in ostinati, doublings, and repetition of small melodic fragments.
Ben Weber (1916–79). Weber was among the first post-ultra-modern twelve-tone composers in America—his Five Bagatelles, op. 2, dates from 1939. For Weber, the twelve-tone approach provided a framework—an “available form,” in his words—for relatively free compositional activity: “When I began to write twelve-tone music it was very unfashionable to do it—in fact nobody knew about it—and it has become passé. I only used it as a method of organizing my music so I could maintain my technical relationship to what I was doing. . . . I simply invented always with material closely related in a certain sense to the way Schoenberg composed. It's simply an available form—that's all.”Footnote 77 Weber's later works use a twelve-tone series as much more a precompositional impetus than a thematic presence on the musical surface. As his compositional style develops, the music remains highly chromatic and aggregate-based, but without much apparent concern for serial ordering even of smaller units, much less of all twelve tones.
Leonard Rosenman (1924–). A student of Schoenberg, Sessions, Bloch, and Dallapiccola between 1947 and 1952, Rosenman went on to a long and distinguished career as a film composer. His score for The Cobweb is not notably aggregate-based, but it uses a twelve-tone series as a source of motivic material, and these motives are subjected to various kinds of development, including the use of the familiar twelve-tone transformations: transposition, inversion, retrograde, and combinations of these. Rosenman employed this compositional style, as many later film composers did, to express intense and often negative emotions: “[I did not do it] simply because I felt it was important to write a serial score. I felt that the film really could have used this kind of treatment. I also felt that it would have set off the film as not simply a pot-boiler melodrama which happened to center around an insane asylum but rather a film in which this kind of expressionistic music could be, so to speak, mind reading or, as I say, super-real.”Footnote 78
Elliott Carter (1908–). Although Carter has never identified himself as a twelve-tone composer, all of his music can be described as the thorough and systematic exploration of the aggregate of twelve pitch classes, especially its division into smaller collections and the combination of smaller collections to create larger ones. Beginning in 1980 with Night Fantasies, Carter's music uses extended progressions of twelve-note chords that shape the surrounding melodic and contrapuntal activity and are involved in projecting large-scale polymetric schemes.
Peter Lieberson (1946–). As a student of Babbitt, Martino, and Wuorinen, Lieberson grew up in the American postwar twelve-tone tradition. But his career path has been notably different from theirs: he holds no academic position, has written no music-theoretical prose or, indeed, virtually anything about his own music, and lives far from the academic centers of the American Northeast. Most of Lieberson's music since his student days has been twelve tone in orientation, although he has generally been more concerned with the aggregate and its division into hexachords than with serial ordering and serial transformation (the hexachords relate to each other as unordered collections, not as serially ordered lines).
Myth No. 6: The Myth of Serial Orthodoxy
The myth of serial orthodoxy maintains that there is a single normative way to compose serial music and that everything else represents a deviation or the taking of a liberty.
Copland remained consistently critical of the twelve-tone method as found in certain works by Schoenberg and many of his followers. He believed, rather, in expanding the method to permit more spontaneous procedures; he liked in particular to see it accommodate tonal resources. . . . Copland's actual use of the row marks an even greater divergence from twelve-tone orthodoxy.Footnote 79
In fact, there is an extraordinary variety of serial music, sharing only an attitude and a point of departure. There is no orthodoxy, and thus no possibility of heresy. As Krenek observed in 1953, relatively early in the game, “the practice of the twelve-tone technique has been rather flexible from the outset, inasmuch as its inaugurators immediately accepted the invitation to variety held out by the principle they had discovered.”Footnote 80 In the years since, the twelve-tone enterprise has diversified in ways Krenek could not have imagined. In retrospect, we can find remarkable stylistic and structural variety among twelve-tone composers, within the oeuvre of individual composers, and even within single works.
Schoenberg himself cannot represent twelve-tone orthodoxy inasmuch as his own practice varied so much from work to work, including the tetrachordal organization of the Suite for Piano, op. 25, the rotational schemes of the Wind Quintet, the multiple rows of the String Quartet no. 3, the eighteen-note row of the String Trio, and the “tropic” organization of the Violin Phantasy.Footnote 81 Schoenberg's twelve-tone practice is much more varied than is often realized.
Schoenberg's Second Viennese School colleagues, Webern and Berg, offered alternative twelve-tone practices right from the start. The three composers share an interest in organizing the aggregate of all twelve pitch classes and in serial ordering and transformation, but beyond that common concern each pursues the twelve-tone idea in a distinctive direction. And there is no good reason to regard Webern and Berg as deviating from an established orthodoxy. What is sometimes referred to as Schoenberg's “mature style” had not yet crystallized when Webern and Berg created their own distinctive twelve-tone languages and, as observed above, Schoenberg's style itself was rather flexible. We should understand Webern and Berg on their own terms rather than as deviating from a Schoenbergian practice that was itself variable.
Among American twelve-tone composers, the notion of orthodoxy becomes even less tenable. American twelve-tone practice has included the very different rotational schemes of Crawford, Krenek, and Stravinsky, Babbitt's trichordal, all-partition, and super arrays, Carter's twelve-note chords, Mamlok's contracting concentric circles through an array, Wuorinen's time-point system, Martino's “chain forms,” Perle's twelve-tone tonality, Rochberg's “spatialization,” Shapey's “Mother Lode,” Finney's “complementarity,” Copland's “freely interpreted tonalism,” Berger's “neoclassic twelve-tone music,” Morris's “compositional designs,” and many more. Each composer has a distinctive way (or perhaps more than one way) of composing twelve-tone music. There is no single orthodoxy against which heresies may be measured, no single mainstream with smaller tributaries.
One of the principal factors precluding the emergence of twelve-tone orthodoxy was simple ignorance. A standard practice cannot exist unless that practice is widely known. As a general matter, twelve-tone composers have had only limited technical knowledge of their colleagues' music. Schoenberg wrote very little about his twelve-tone method, and his American students (including John Cage, Patricia Carpenter, Lou Harrison, Richard Hoffman, Earl Kim, Leon Kirchner, Dika Newlin, and Leonard Rosenman,) were not notably active in promoting it.Footnote 82 Because the ultra-modern composers knew very little actual music by Schoenberg, Webern, or Berg (scores and recordings were almost entirely unavailable), they took what they knew and continued in their own directions. Scores and recordings continued to be relatively scarce after the war and, even when available, it was difficult to glean from them the outlines of a twelve-tone compositional method. Published sources in English, including treatises by Krenek, Leibowitz, Rufer, and Perle, were incomplete at best.Footnote 83 What little the American composers could discover of contemporary developments in postwar Europe was of little interest to them—insofar as the Americans know what Boulez, Stockhausen, and the other Darmstadt composers were doing, they were dismissive of it (and the favor was returned with interest). Personal networks were a better but still not necessarily reliable source of information. A significant technical, music-theoretical literature began to emerge starting around 1960, especially in the pages of Perspectives of New Music, but this literature was generally too challenging linguistically to reach a wide audience, even among composers.
One can think of the history of twelve-tone composition as a series of misreadings, based in some cases on the kind of willed resistance to predecessor works described by Harold Bloom, but based more often simply on lack of reliable information. American twelve-tone composers have never coalesced into a single or even a number of identifiable serial schools. What we have instead is a group of highly individual independent thinkers who vary widely in the extent of their mutual knowledge and even more widely in their compositional practice.
Arthur Berger (1912–2003). Berger's twelve-tone music, especially in the 1950s, had a distinctively neoclassical quality, as though Berger were seeking a musical rapprochement of neoclassicism and serialism. More accurately, it appears as though Berger found in twelve-tone serialism a way of crystallizing and intensifying his Stravinskyian concerns with rhythmic incisiveness, clarity of texture, and concern with the integrity and expressiveness of the individual interval. His description of his Chamber Music for Thirteen Players (1956) as a “neoclassic twelve-tone” work might also be applied to many of his works from the period.Footnote 84
Samuel Barber (1910–81). Whereas Berger (like Stravinsky) gradually abandoned his neoclassical orientation and remained a twelve-tone composer for the rest of his life, Barber (like Britten, Shostakovich, and Piston) never ceased being a tonal composer but nonetheless incorporated twelve-tone structures from time to time.Footnote 85 In both his Piano Sonata (1949) and Nocturne (1959), Barber found ways of staging a musical drama in which tonal and twelve-tone elements are juxtaposed and, with varying degrees of completeness, integrated with each other.
Irving Fine (1914–62). Fine, identified by Copland along with Berger as a member of a neoclassical, Boston-based “Stravinsky School,” became a twelve-tone composer before Stravinsky did. His twelve-tone music is grounded in the twelve-tone series and its canonical transformations, but is relatively free as to serial ordering and treats the series to various partitioning schemes rather than presenting complete series statements. Fine has a notion of embellishing series tones with either series-derived or more neutral kinds of figuration.Footnote 86 His twelve-tone music also maintains a strong sense of pitch centricity, evocative of traditional tonality.Footnote 87
Louise Talma (1906–96). Like Fine and Berger, Talma is often identified as a member of an American neoclassical “Stravinsky School,” and like Fine, Berger, and Stravinsky, she became a twelve-tone composer in the 1950s, initially in a style she considered relatively “strict” (up through her opera The Alcestiad in 1958) and then in a more “relaxed” style she pursued for the rest of her creative life.Footnote 88 Her twelve-tone works in the more relaxed style use the series as a point of departure and a source of motivic material more than as a constant thematic presence. By virtue of the construction of her series and their use, her music often creates and moves through diatonic and octatonic sound worlds.
Myth No. 7: The Myth of Serial Purity
The myth of serial purity maintains that serial compositions follow certain generic rules (including alleged rules about avoiding placing emphasis on any one of the twelve tones through repetition or doubling, avoidance of tonal references, and using only one series and deriving every note from it or its transformations) in relation to which nonconforming tones are understood as freedoms or liberties.Footnote 89 If the myth of serial orthodoxy imagines that twelve-tone repertoires conform to (or deviate from) a single compositional approach, the myth of serial purity imagines that individual twelve-tone works conform to, or deviate from, sets of rules governing details within individual compositions.
But what are we to think of Schoenberg's American period, during which the greatest disarray and most deplorable demagnetization appeared? How could we, unless with a supplementary—and superfluous—measure, judge such lack of comprehension and cohesion, that reevaluation of polarizing functions, even of tonal functions? Rigorous writing was abandoned in those works. In them we see appearing again the octave intervals, the false cadences, the exact canons at the octave. Such an attitude attests to maximum incoherence—a paroxysm in the absurdity of Schoenberg's incompatibilities.Footnote 90
Boulez upholds serial purity as an ideal. By this standard, Schoenberg fails, and most of American twelve-tone music fails. If we can set aside Boulez's negative valuation for a moment, we can acknowledge that his description of Schoenberg's music is basically correct. Schoenberg's music, especially his American music, is permeated with tonal references, doublings, triads, extramusical associations, and explicit political agendas. The same observation extends to most American twelve-tone music.
The ultra-moderns (Crawford, Ruggles, and Riegger, especially) avoided writing purely twelve-tone pieces. It is much more characteristic of their approach to juxtapose serial and non-serial elements, often for dramatic or expressive purposes. Among the European émigrés, virtually all would be judged impure by Boulez's standards, as would virtually every postwar American serial composer.
Neither Schoenberg himself nor the American twelve-tone composers upheld serial purity as an ideal in their written comments—I cannot think of any writings by Schoenberg, Babbitt, or others that share Boulez's aesthetic attitude.Footnote 91 American twelve-tone composers have never maintained an interest in twelve-tone purity. Rather, from its beginnings and up to the present moment, American twelve-tone music has been a hybrid enterprise, a music in which serial and non-serial elements are juxtaposed with each other.
Underlying the myth of serial purity is the incorrect notion that twelve-tone composition is a rule-bound enterprise, and that the appearance of non-serial elements, as well as pitch repetitions, doublings, and tonal reference constitute a violation of the rules. On the contrary, composers make their own rules on the fly, in the context of specific compositional situations. Schoenberg noted the following in 1936:
The theorists always fall into the error of believing their theories to be rules for composers instead of symptoms of the works, rules which a composer has to obey, instead of peculiarities which are extracted from the works.Footnote 92
The myth of serial purity (and its corollary belief in a set of rigid rules) is regrettably held not only by critics and historians, but in many cases by the composers themselves. As Arthur Berger bitterly states:
Some of us wrote twelve-tone music without observing the rules promulgated by what I once named the “New Theorists” of the Princeton school. . . . Such composers were considered not “strict” but, after all, Schoenberg had also written twelve-tone music without the benefit of the Princeton theorists.Footnote 93
In a similar vein, Irving Fine talked about “cheating” when he incorporated elements that cannot be accounted for readily in relation to the series.Footnote 94 Indeed, many twelve-tone composers defensively maintain that their music is not “strict” but composed “by ear,” and biographies like those of Fine, Barber, and Copland (cited above) often take pains to argue that this particular composer is not a “strict” serialist, but rather one who is willing to bend the “rules” and to take whatever “liberties” are required by the musical (and presumably non-twelve-tone) ear.
Whether these sorts of comments are made by historians or the composers themselves, they are based on the misguided assumption that some composers are writing pure twelve-tone music that follow all of the rules. In fact, serial practice in the United States has always involved hybridity—there is no example of pure, strict serialism, no set of “rules” to follow or break. The twelve-tone method is a procedure, a point of departure, a way composers orient themselves with respect to the twelve tones, not a system in any sense. Instead of a larger system of rules defining a central, orthodox practice, there exist loosely connected local practices, each with its own distinctive set of compositional procedures. The individual practices may be systematic to varying degrees, but there is no single, overriding twelve-tone system.
Gunther Schuller (1925–). A musical polymath, with careers as a composer, horn player, conductor, historian, and administrator, Schuller has been closely identified with what he dubbed “third stream” music, “a new genre of music located about halfway between jazz and classical music.”Footnote 95 His comments on Transformation (1956) may be taken as applying to much of his twelve-tone music: “In my own ‘Transformation' a variety of musical concepts converge: twelve-tone technique, Klangfarbenmelodie (tone-color-melody), jazz improvisation, and metric breaking up of the jazz beat. . . . The intention in this piece was never to fuse jazz and classical elements into a totally new alloy, but rather to present them initially in succession—in peaceful coexistence—and later, in close, more competitive juxtaposition.”Footnote 96
Mel Powell (1923–98). Powell had two separate and equally distinguished careers, one in jazz and the other in “classical” music. From the mid-1950s through the end of his career Powell was a composer of twelve-tone music. For the most part, Powell kept his two musical worlds quite separate, but some of the improvisatory spirit of jazz (if nothing of its rhythms and harmonies) permeates Powell's classical music. Powell's twelve-tone music is usually based on what he called a “pitch tableau,” an aggregate of all twelve pitch classes within which register is generally fixed (that is, each pitch class occurs in only one register) and order is generally not fixed.Footnote 97 Within a tableau, the melodic/harmonic surface is essentially improvised against the backdrop of the registrally fixed pitch classes, and one finds considerable repetition of pitches.
Hale Smith (1925–). Like Schuller and Powell, Smith had a distinguished lineage in both classical (he was a student of Marcel Dick) and jazz traditions (he had broad experience as a performer, composer, and orchestrator of jazz). But unlike Schuller (who strove for an explicit juxtaposition and integration of serial writing and jazz) or Powell (who sought to keep his two musical worlds as separate as possible), Smith wrote twelve-tone music that subtly engages jazz, more as a mood or an inflection than a structural determinant.Footnote 98 With reference to his twelve-tone piano piece Evocation (1966), Smith commented: “The entire piece derives from the row exposed in the first stave, and in several places has faint but definite affinities to jazz phrasing. This doesn't mean that it's supposed to swing—it isn't, but the affinities are there.”Footnote 99
Myth No. 8: The Myth of Non-Repetition
The myth of non-repetition maintains that serial music is designed to prevent any of the twelve tones from receiving any particular musical emphasis by requiring that no tone may be repeated until the remaining eleven have been sounded.
Music written in the tradition of functional harmony strikes some sort of balance between repetition and change: between the redundant and the unexpected. Twelve-tone atonalism was, among other things, a total rejection of redundancy: the avoidance of repetition was axiomatic.Footnote 100
Among the most important rules of the twelve-tone system, what is sometimes called the “constant circulation” rule, requires that all twelve tones be presented in a work before any one is repeated.Footnote 101
[Irving] Fine's serialism had little to do with Schoenberg's, for he ignored Schoenberg's rules about the avoidance of note repetition and doubling at the octave.Footnote 102
In fact, while the principle of non-repetition typically applies to a twelve-tone series, it has never been true of any twelve-tone work, by Schoenberg or anyone else. In a narrow logical sense, it could only be true of a single melodic line in which the twelve pitch classes were presented again and again in the same order, and even in such a case, notes will always receive differential emphasis by virtue of registral position and duration. If the order of the notes changes at all, there will be repetition before all twelve notes have been heard. In twelve-tone music, as in most music, more than one event is going on at a time: melodies vary in shape and are typically accompanied by harmonies, or by other melodies. In such situations, it would be impossible to apply the principle of non-repetition even if one wanted to.
The myth of non-repetition has its roots in some of Schoenberg's statements, but not in anything he or anyone else actually did. Schoenberg's best-known comment on the subject suggests that he is talking about non-repetition within the series, not within the music:
This method [i.e., Composing with Twelve Tones Which are Related Only with One Another] consists primarily of the constant and exclusive use of a set of twelve different tones. This means, of course, that no tone is repeated within the series and that it uses all twelve tones of the chromatic scale, though in a different order.Footnote 103
In actuality, almost from the beginning, Schoenberg's twelve-tone music cultivated repetitions of all kinds, within and between parts. Even a cursory look at any passage of his music, especially the later, American works, will confirm this tendency, as will a survey of the analytical literature on Schoenberg, with its pronounced emphasis on pitch-class invariance, that is, on the rhetorically charged repetition of notes and groups of notes. Twelve-tone music is best regarded as a method for creating and channeling repetition than for precluding it.
Myth No. 9: The Myth of Anti-Tonality
The myth of anti-tonality maintains that twelve-tone music is designed to avoid referring to the sonorities (i.e., consonant triads), textures, forms, and sense of key associated with common-practice tonal music.
[With the waning of the serial “hegemony,” Bolcom expresses relief that he does] “not to have to worry about two hundred composers looking over your shoulder disapprovingly if you dare to write a triad.Footnote 104
By embracing the earlier traditions of tonality and combining them with the more recently developed atonality, I found it possible to release my music from the overintense, expressionistic manner inherent in a purely serially organized, constant chromaticism.Footnote 105
Tonal effects and references were part of the serial enterprise from the very beginning and it would be more accurate to say that twelve-tone serialism, as practiced by Schoenberg and by many American twelve-tone composers, is a way of creating and shaping tonal references—it is frequently about evoking and channeling tonality, not about repressing it.
Like the myth of non-repetition, the myth of anti-tonality probably has its roots in written comments by Schoenberg, such as the following statement: “In twelve-tone composition consonances (major and minor triads) and also the simpler dissonances (diminished triads and seventh chords)—in fact almost everything that used to make up the ebb and flow of harmony—are, as far as possible, avoided.”Footnote 106 But Schoenberg made such comments early on, when there was very little twelve-tone music in existence. Indeed, his words are contradicted by his own practice and provide a caveat about relying solely on what composers say instead of examining the music they write. Traditionally tonal forms and structures play a significant, explicit role in Schoenberg's twelve-tone music, from the Suite, op. 25, through the American works of his final creative period. Critics have disagreed on the role of tonality in Schoenberg's music, some viewing it as a source of (often ironic) reference, others as a structural determinant, but no one denies its presence.
To a large extent, American twelve-tone composers have followed Schoenberg's lead in incorporating extensive and pervasive tonal references throughout their music. Indeed, I would argue that amid the astonishing diversity of American twelve-tone writing, a persistent engagement with traditional tonality is a unifying and defining characteristic. In Copland's case, for example, his comments on his Piano Fantasy apply equally well to all of his twelve-tone music:
The Piano Fantasy is by no means rigorously controlled twelve-tone music, but it makes liberal use of devices associated with that technique. It seemed to me at the time that the twelve-tone method was pointing in two opposite directions: toward the extreme of total organization with electronic applications, and toward a gradual absorption into what had become a very freely interpreted tonalism. My use of the method in the Piano Fantasy was of the latter kind.Footnote 107
Something similar is true of Wuorinen's twelve-tone “time-point system,” which is designed precisely to project centric effects.Footnote 108 The focus on particular notes is a persistent feature of Martino's twelve-tone music, and some pieces, such as the Seven Pious Pieces and the Paradiso Choruses, have not only a sense of pitch centricity but a distinctively triadic, tonal sound.Footnote 109 One of the most distinctive aspects of Finney's twelve-tone music is its persistent sense of tonal center. For Finney, and for many other American serialists, one of the attractions of the twelve-tone approach was precisely the ways in which it enabled rather than discouraged tonal effects:
Now my music always was and still is tonal. Even my twelve-tone music is tonal. . . . [My Sixth String Quartet] was tonal because when I got to the end, it was tonic. I would have bridge passages that would lead from one level to another. This process of modulation, or movement, was function. In other words, it was the function that concerned me. It was function that was concerning me when I was with Alban Berg. It's tonal, but it isn't triadic. I don't consider triadic [to be] of any more importance than anything else.Footnote 110
In twelve-tone music, especially as practiced in America, tonal effects and references were not an unintended or undesired by-product but rather a fundamental part of the enterprise from the very beginning.
Myth No. 10: The Myth of Math
The myth of math maintains that twelve-tone music is controlled by mathematical formulas, precluding compositional liberty and the intervention of the musical ear.
Forty years ago the serialists held the greatest intimidating force in the small world of modern composition; then there was a terrific rebellion against many of its assumptions—I was certainly part of that rebellion—and now it is OK to attack all serialists, indeed all the new music of the period roughly between 1950 and 1975. And it is true that much ugly music of that time, written with the help of complex pseudo-mathematical processes, really doesn't need rehearing.Footnote 111
Serious composers, experimental in the 1920s, socially aware in the 1930s, and quieted by war in the 1940s, suddenly diverged in two totally different but equally radical paths. Some, extending ideas of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, sought total determination of every nuance of a piece through mathematical calculations.Footnote 112
Although mathematics has played a significant role in theorizing twelve-tone music (and all music), it has played a negligible role in the composition of twelve-tone music. Music theorists (including composer-theorists like Babbitt, Carter, Perle, Martino, and Wuorinen) have used mathematical formalisms to generate and model abstract, precompositional musical materials. They theorize general, abstract relations among the twelve tones. Twelve-tone composers, however, while they may use these theoretical models as a point of departure, compose their music in the usual way, with contextual decisions guided by their musical ears.Footnote 113 The math does not and cannot control or determine the music in any meaningful sense.
Speculative music theory of all kinds and in all eras involves the use of numbers to model musical phenomena, and a good deal of twelve-tone theory has qualities of intellectual rigor, systematic thought and exposition, and formal and often mathematical language. These would all seem to be highly desirable qualities in a theory. But there is no reason to assume that the same qualities characterize the music these theorists are attempting to describe. Indeed, it is a logical fallacy to attribute the qualities of a theoretical model to the music being modeled. Twelve-tone theory may often be cerebral, academic, mathy—that's the nature of music theory—but that tells us nothing about the internal qualities of the music. To put it most bluntly, it is wrong to confuse what the theorists say and the way they say it for what the composers do and how they do it (and it's still wrong even when the theorists in question are themselves composers).
Whether formalized or not, twelve-tone precompositional designs exert relatively little control over the actual, audible musical events. Far from predetermining or overdetermining what happens in a work, the various twelve-tone systems provide merely a useful starting point, a way of thinking about the twelve tones.Footnote 114
The twelve-tone approach opens up a musical world not of mathematical overdetermination, but rather of creative underdermination, a world of associational networks created contextually rather than a rigid hierarchy imposed from outside.
The myth of math appears to have two principal sources. First, it involves a familiar confusion of the European and American approaches to twelve-tone composition. The relatively small group of American twelve-tone composers who actually engaged mathematical formalism in some way did so as a way of gaining perspective on the relations among the twelve tones in an abstract, precompositional way, not as a way of composing music. Second, historians have paid too much attention to what composers have said and the manner in which they said it and too little attention to the music they wrote and the manner in which they wrote it. As with many of the myths surveyed in this article, the myth of math is best disposed of by looking at and listening to the actual music.
Myth No. 11: The Myth of the Matrix
The myth of the matrix holds that the pitches of a twelve-tone piece can be referred to the forty-eight members of a row class presented in the familiar 12 × 12 matrix: twelve primes, twelve inversion, twelve retrogrades, and twelve retrograde-inversions. The myth has origins in a study of much of Schoenberg's and Webern's music, for example, which can be understood in terms of explicit, demonstrable statements of members of the row class. However, most American postwar twelve-tone music uses a different approach. In many cases, a work might derive only some of its material explicitly from the series and its transformations—the remaining music might be loosely derived from the series or strongly contrast with it. This kind of hybridity is a feature of the music of Riegger, Crawford, Schuller, Sessions, Copland, and many others, indeed, it is one of the defining characteristics of American twelve-tone music.
In other cases, composers have devised twelve-tone systems that are not primarily concerned with the series and its transformations. Examples include Krenek and Stravinsky's rotational schemes (which focus on the hexachord, not on the series), Perle's “twelve-tone tonality,” Shapey's “Mother Lode,” Mamlok's individual paths through the matrix (which rarely produce an actual series statement), and Martino and Carter's systematic exploration of the aggregate and its partitions. Similarly, Wuorinen points out the impossibility in most of his music of identifying specific series forms—the series is not normally an explicit, thematic element of the musical surface: “[I]f you went hunting in any of my works for the last, at least quarter century, looking for the row, you're going to have a very hard time.”Footnote 115
Like Babbitt and Wuorinen, Martino is a twelve-tone composer in whose music one rarely finds explicit statements of a twelve-tone series:
I hold a broad view of the twelve-tone system which permits me to use the set or sets I have formulated as a source from which to draw a network of deductions. I tend to see the set as a premise that leads me in certain directions. You may not even be able to find it after a while, but the fact that I've formulated it, that it's back there somewhere, guiding my actions, means that it is still operative in the profoundest sense. If that's what serialism is, then I suppose I am a serial composer.Footnote 116
Krenek and Stravinsky voiced similar sentiments considerably earlier.Footnote 117
In the popular imagination, and in many historical accounts and textbooks, a twelve-tone piece is imagined as one that can be understood in terms of concatenated statements of a twelve-tone series, related by transposition, inversion, retrograde, or combinations of these, that is, as musical explorations of a row class. In reality, however, relatively few twelve-tone works can be understood in this way, and the familiar twelve-by-twelve matrix is thus largely useless as a descriptive tool.
Abandoning the myth of the matrix has implications in several directions. First, analysis of twelve-tone music needs to proceed on a more context-sensitive basis. There are many ways of writing a twelve-tone piece, and correspondingly many ways of analyzing them. Second, the emerging field of music perception and cognition needs to acknowledge the relative uselessness of studies that take the twelve-tone series and the row class as their points of departure. If we want to learn how keen listeners hear twelve-tone music, we need to have a sense of what sorts of relationships there are in the music to which they might usefully attend. As noted above, the row class is often not the best or most immediate source of musical relationships, and accordingly the ability to recognize a twelve note series under pitch-class transposition, inversion, retrograde, or retrograde-inversion will not be particularly useful, or worth measuring. Finally, the histories we write about this music need to take better account of its actual organization, which may relate to a twelve-tone series and its familiar transformations indirectly, distantly, evasively, or not at all.
Myth No. 12: The Myth of Un-Americanness
The myth of un-Americanness maintains that twelve-tone music, because it lacks a direct connection with American vernacular and popular traditions, is more European than American.
For several decades, native composers had been moving toward a style that reflected something of America's indigenous music, something of the character of the American people. American audiences were beginning to respond to some of this music. . . . [In the postwar period, however,] American composers in effect started all over again, rather than blending elements of foreign music with the emerging American musical language. In following this path, they also asked their listeners to begin again, to forget earlier attempts at an American style, to attempt to come to terms with a musical language making no reference to cultural, aesthetic, or musical elements of their own country.Footnote 118
European modernism has been associated in the US with the “East-coast, academic” composers and thus opposed to the more “authentically American” experimentalists. As far as I am aware, the “East-coast academic” composers in their turn associated themselves with the European avant garde. In doing so they tended to seize on aspects with which they themselves were more comfortable, and these were primarily concerned with the ideology of autonomy: hence, for instance, the “hard-core formalism” early years of Perspectives of New Music. Thus, the representation of the avant garde by “East-coast, academic” composers, who have mostly shied away from the messy politicization and rampant radicalism of Darmstadt, has contributed to the one-sided view of modernism in general. The irony here is that the European avant garde, for its part, has overwhelmingly sympathized with the American experimental tradition and, on the whole, has shown little interest in the academic school.Footnote 119
Setting aside the unsettling echoes in a critique of a music as insufficiently rooted in the blood and soil of the fatherland, the myth of un-Americanness simultaneously underestimates the extent to which twelve-tone music in the United States connects with distinctly American musical traditions, cultivated and vernacular, and the extent to which it has come to occupy a distinctive place in the history and texture of American music.Footnote 120
As we have seen, a good deal of American twelve-tone music (by Schuller, Smith, and others, including Babbitt, the composer of All Set) makes explicit reference to jazz, an uncontroversially American music. Indeed, as I have argued, this kind of hybridity is one of the hallmarks of American twelve-tone music. Beyond its reference to the American vernacular, however, twelve-tone music by American composers forms a significant and distinctive feature of American musical life, before and after World War II, and up to the present moment. Whatever its intrinsic merits, this music has become an important part of our national tradition, no less American than jazz, Cage-inspired experimentalism, or any other musical style one might name.
As we continue to write the history of American music since 1925 and account for the position of twelve-tone music within that history, we have four principal obligations that have not yet been adequately met. First, we have the obligation to describe twelve-tone music accurately. That will require listening to it and studying it, not merely repeating conventional falsehoods about non-repetition, anti-tonality, and mathematical formulas. Second, the music we describe should include a broad range of twelve-tone music, not just music of one or two “great men.” Third, we have an obligation to write more comprehensive histories of twelve-tone composition in the United States, expanding our study to the decades before and after the 1950s and 1960s—too many standard historical accounts have collectively erased twelve-tone music from discussions of American music after 1970. Last, we need to abandon historiographical models that presume a steady evolution and favor the newest currents; instead, we should focus on providing thicker descriptions of the full range of musical activity—histories that acknowledge modernist styles, including twelve-tone serialism, as vibrant strands within the postmodern musical fabric.
