5 ms·

The case against serialism is easy. Tone rows are a pointless conceit. They turn composition into a crossword puzzle. It's a worthless constraint. There is not

The case against serialism is easy. Tone rows are a pointless conceit. They turn composition into a crossword puzzle. It's a worthless constraint. There is nothing you can do with tone rows - retrogrades, inversions, permutations, all of it - that you can't do in free atonality. There's an argument that serialism forces composers to use those operations instead of falling back towards conventional theory. But in fact the opposite happened. It didn't take long for serial composers to start mining serialism for tonal elements. As for popularity - you can find abstract expressionist paintings for sale on Etsy. You won't find much hard serial music on Bandcamp. And it's pretty easy to generate it with software now. But most of all Schoenberg was trying too hard to be remembered. Bach, Mozart, Debussy and his predecessors saw themselves as jobbing composers. They knew they had to keep at least one ear moored in audience expectations. Schoenberg desperately wanted to be remembered as a great innovator. He didn't care if audiences loved or hated the music, as long as his name was out there was an Important Composer.

gnulinux 3y ago
> There's an argument that serialism forces composers to use those operations instead of falling back towards conventional theory. But in fact the opposite happened. It didn't take long for serial composers to start mining serialism for tonal elements. Nothing of this sort happened except in very exceptional cases where it's very obvious and clearly intentional, such as Alban Berg (who chose adversarially tonal tone rows). Besides you assume the only benefit you get from serialism is atonality but that makes no sense because many composers used tonal rows too (i.e. tone rows with 7 or 9 pitch classes in the Major or Minor system). Not only that but different composers used serialism for different purposes. You are however right that Schoenberg assumed 12 tone serialism implies some form of atonality, which is incorrect. Research shows that he had a bias towards atonal tone rows. Lerdahl's criticism of serialism is also convincing, i.e. the abstract structure of music does not translate to the heard structure of music. It's fair to classify this as the "art" part of writing serialistic pieces that theory is insufficient. Besides all of this, traditional music theory teaching focuses too much on serialism as a "technique" and not enough as a "structure", which was the main point of Schoenberg. For example, Elliot Carter claims he doesn't intentionally use row vectors or row matrices in his compositions, but his works can certainly be analyzed and understood this way. It seems like for a minor subset of free atonal compositions serialism is the natural structure of this kind of music. This point is often missed. I firmly disagree with your points about Schoenberg. I think he's one of the two gigantic innovators of music in 20th century: Philip Glass and him. (I understand this is extremely controversial, opinions are mine). It really takes a lot to make artistic statements so profound your works look misplaced in your canon but are still firmly part of it.
- mrob 3y ago
  >gigantic innovators of music in 20th century I still hold out hope that someday Harry Partch will get the recognition he deserves. If traditional Western harmony is played out, surely the obvious solution is adding more notes? It makes more sense to me than trying to wring out the last few drops of novelty using Schoenberg's ideas. Partch demonstrated that microtonal works can sound both pleasant and novel, but musicians are strangely resistant to the idea. One exception is Sevish, who produces some of the most interesting electronic dance and ambient music I've heard. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-JZhCWsk3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-JZhCWsk3M I wish more musicians would compose stuff like this.
  - vonjuice 3y ago
    I find microtonality gimmicky
    - gnulinux 3y ago
      Me too. It's not a convincing direction for art music imho. This is my biggest criticism of Ligeti. I don't think he needed that detuned flute in his Violin Concerto. Otherwise love his music to my bones.
    - mrob 3y ago
      It's true that a lot of microtonal music is gimmicky, but I think that's the fault of the composers, not the tuning systems. Do you find barbershop music gimmicky? The defining feature of the genre (harmonic seventh chords) is microtonal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_seventh_chord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_seventh_chord
      - vonjuice 3y ago
        I'd not consider just intonation to be microtonality. I guess it technically is? But to me it conveys something different. For example, there's period performances of Bach pieces played in harpsichords tuned in just intonation. I'd not say that's microtonality.
squidsoup 3y ago
Interesting distinction you make between experimental composers and those with _some_ desire to appeal to a broader audience, or at least some conventional sensibility. I think the same applies to contemporary music - while I personally find great pleasure in the moment listening to free jazz, noise, and ambient music, it is ephemeral and soon forgotten. The music that I find memorable, that truly haunts me, has elements of the experimental, but is still fundamentally melodic. My Bloody Valentine might be a good example.
- vonjuice 3y ago
  > it is ephemeral and soon forgotten. I disagree with this. Complexity is just harder to remember, it requires more attention and more iterations to remember it.
bjornlouser 3y ago
"But most of all Schoenberg was trying too hard to be remembered. Bach, Mozart, Debussy and his predecessors saw themselves as jobbing composers. They knew they had to keep at least one ear moored in audience expectations." But weren't audience expectations tainted by the musical establishment? Debussy (born 1862) won the Prix de Rome, but somehow Ravel (born 1875, one year after Schoenberg) was snubbed for five consecutive years. Something terrible seems to have happened in music schools around the turn of the century. It's hard to blame Schoenberg for wanting to watch it all burn.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
msluyter 3y ago
I majored in flute performance in college, and have listened / played a lot of avante garde music. My roommate, a bass player, and I were really into it at the time. We once played Shoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire on a tape loop over and over for an entire week -- and emerged with our sanity mostly intact. (An interesting side fact is that now I can barely recall it.) I played Luciano Berio's Sequenza on my Sr. recital. In retrospect, I think I was mostly relishing playing the role of enfant terrible, playing weird music just to get a rise out of people. These days I don't willingly listen to atonal music of the Shoenberg/Carter/Boulez variety. I have a variety of theories about why modern classical music tends to be rejected, but in the end, all I can really say is that I have a subjective response to, say, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, that's entirely different from his Movements for Piano & Orchestra.
- Tainnor 3y ago
  Pierrot Lunaire is pre-dodecaphonic Schönberg, though. I actually find it quite charming, in a way.
- gnulinux 3y ago
  Luciano Berio's Sequenza aren't traditionally considered serialist (absolutely gorgeous and stunning set of compositions BTW). Although he certainly "sounds" serialist "as a style" the same way Elliot Carter is a "serialist" even though he claims he never used it as a "technique". I really like your point with respect to "Rite of Spring" vs his "Movements for Piano & Orchestra". But let's please note that he likely never attempted to invoke the same kind of vibe anyway, so I don't think it really proves anything. The reality is, composers used serialistic techniques for something other than what neoclassicists wanted to create. For a better comparison, compare Elliot Carter's late piano works with his first piano sonata, which he wanted to write in neoclassical style. You can see the same Carter hue (that's likely more similar to "Movements for Piano & Orchestra" than Stravinsky's "Violin Concerto") in both so it's a more direct comparison in my very humble opinion. With respect to: > why modern classical music tends to be rejected I find this claim that contemporary Western classical music is irrelevant wrong. I think its cultural force is significant. I wrote more about this in HN here [1] if you care to read. But in short, just because an artistic movement inspires artists and not the audience, it doesn't mean it won't indirectly impact the audience, since artists who will go and create mainstream art may be inspired by the innovators of their era. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37424409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37424409
roy-wurlitzer 3y ago
"There is plenty of good music left to be written in C major." - Schoenberg I got that from Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, an accessible history of 20th century composition. I went in ready to dislike Schoenberg but I walked away pretty charmed with him. I don't enjoy listening to any of his serial pieces, but I loved the twinkly little notes that play in Zelda BOTW when you're riding your horse. I don't claim that there's a _direct_ line from 12 tone rows to that, but overall I like living in the post-Schoenberg world where I hear a lot of the "intrepid elements of atonality, pointillist riffs" that the Atlantic author points to.
chongli 3y ago
What do you think about the application of his theory to film scores? I’m immediately reminded of Jerry Goldsmith’s work for Planet of the Apes. Extremely atonal and alien, that score is really effective at putting the audience off-balance and feeling unsettled. I love it!
ajross 3y ago
> The case against serialism is easy. You can make exactly the same case about tonal voice leading rules too. Rules are a "pointless conceit" by definition. "Free atonality" can, again by definition, do anything it wants, including emiting a J. S. Bach fugue or whatever. This is a tautological case. In fact the whole point to music is rules. We have expectations about what we hear and how that works and what it means, and you write "new" music by breaking or bending just a few of them, or otherwise finding ways to do stuff other people haven't. And Schoenberg was trying to find a way to write a new set of rules. It didn't catch on, for the most part, but it wasn't "pointless". You can hear tone rows and learn the rules and "understand" a 12-tone piece in ways that you can't for arbitrary noise. And that's kinda cool.
- JasonFruit 3y ago
  > You can make exactly the same case about tonal voice leading rules too. You really can't. They aren't laws of nature, but they are based on observation: "When I have two voices proceed in parallel fifths, it's as though one voice ceased to have an independent character. Unless I want that effect, I should avoid that." "When I frustrate a leading tone, it makes the harmonic effect less clear." Schoenberg's system starts with the arbitrary: pick a tone row and use it! But there are rules based on observation there, too: if you use tonal constructions in atonal music, it frustrates the listener's expectations, so don't do that. The ear can recognize the rows when transposed, reversed, and altered by other techniques, so those are good. Serialism is less fully-developed and lacks the deep cultural background of tonal music, but it's not entirely arbitrary either.
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    > "When I have two voices proceed in parallel fifths, it's as though one voice ceased to have an independent character." This is partly true, but that rule (as with many other rules of strict composition) originated with purely vocal music which had to be made easy to sing. There's plenty of music for instruments like the piano or the guitar (even literate music, starting from the early 20th c. or so) where consecutive fifths are played all the time and such a "blending" effect is not really heard. Probably a result of timbre (these instruments have a bit of perceptual "roughness" to them that helps prevent a blended tone) as well as musical context (when consecutive fifths are just part of the music, that kind of sound is expected and easier to understand for the listener).
seanhunter 3y ago
From my read of "Theory of Harmony" and "Structural Functions of Harmony", it seems to me Schoenberg definitely wasn't aiming to be a great innovator, he was desperate to be part of the great tradition and saw serialism as an inevitable consequence of the way in which tonality was being stretched further and further in particular by Wagner and Schoenberg's great hero, Mahler. Schoenberg came up with the idea of serialism because he felt there needed to be some sort of formal constraint to give structure to the music in the absence of harmony because he felt the sense of a tonic was being stretched to breaking point anyway and would inevitably fail. People came up with other ways to provide this structure once the whole serialist -> integral serialist process had worked its way through. Saying there's nothing you can't do in serialism you can't do in free atonality seems unfair. Firstly free atonality came about after integral serialism. Secondly, there's nothing you can do in any type of musical composition that you can't do in free atonality, so you may as well say all the things you can do with functional harmony are a worthless constraint. As for popularity - I personally don't think that's an important characteristic at all, but if you do, there are lots of serialist works that are very popular (eg Wozzeck[1]). [1] And I deliberately chose that one rather than say Berg's violin concerto which is also very popular because that's one of the ones that you're accusing of mining serialism for tonal elements

gnulinux 3y ago

> There's an argument that serialism forces composers to use those operations instead of falling back towards conventional theory. But in fact the opposite happened. It didn't take long for serial composers to start mining serialism for tonal elements. Nothing of this sort happened except in very exceptional cases where it's very obvious and clearly intentional, such as Alban Berg (who chose adversarially tonal tone rows). Besides you assume the only benefit you get from serialism is atonality but that makes no sense because many composers used tonal rows too (i.e. tone rows with 7 or 9 pitch classes in the Major or Minor system). Not only that but different composers used serialism for different purposes. You are however right that Schoenberg assumed 12 tone serialism implies some form of atonality, which is incorrect. Research shows that he had a bias towards atonal tone rows. Lerdahl's criticism of serialism is also convincing, i.e. the abstract structure of music does not translate to the heard structure of music. It's fair to classify this as the "art" part of writing serialistic pieces that theory is insufficient. Besides all of this, traditional music theory teaching focuses too much on serialism as a "technique" and not enough as a "structure", which was the main point of Schoenberg. For example, Elliot Carter claims he doesn't intentionally use row vectors or row matrices in his compositions, but his works can certainly be analyzed and understood this way. It seems like for a minor subset of free atonal compositions serialism is the natural structure of this kind of music. This point is often missed. I firmly disagree with your points about Schoenberg. I think he's one of the two gigantic innovators of music in 20th century: Philip Glass and him. (I understand this is extremely controversial, opinions are mine). It really takes a lot to make artistic statements so profound your works look misplaced in your canon but are still firmly part of it.

mrob 3y ago
>gigantic innovators of music in 20th century I still hold out hope that someday Harry Partch will get the recognition he deserves. If traditional Western harmony is played out, surely the obvious solution is adding more notes? It makes more sense to me than trying to wring out the last few drops of novelty using Schoenberg's ideas. Partch demonstrated that microtonal works can sound both pleasant and novel, but musicians are strangely resistant to the idea. One exception is Sevish, who produces some of the most interesting electronic dance and ambient music I've heard. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-JZhCWsk3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-JZhCWsk3M I wish more musicians would compose stuff like this.
- vonjuice 3y ago
  I find microtonality gimmicky
  - gnulinux 3y ago
    Me too. It's not a convincing direction for art music imho. This is my biggest criticism of Ligeti. I don't think he needed that detuned flute in his Violin Concerto. Otherwise love his music to my bones.
  - mrob 3y ago
    It's true that a lot of microtonal music is gimmicky, but I think that's the fault of the composers, not the tuning systems. Do you find barbershop music gimmicky? The defining feature of the genre (harmonic seventh chords) is microtonal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_seventh_chord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_seventh_chord
    - vonjuice 3y ago
      I'd not consider just intonation to be microtonality. I guess it technically is? But to me it conveys something different. For example, there's period performances of Bach pieces played in harpsichords tuned in just intonation. I'd not say that's microtonality.

squidsoup 3y ago

Interesting distinction you make between experimental composers and those with _some_ desire to appeal to a broader audience, or at least some conventional sensibility. I think the same applies to contemporary music - while I personally find great pleasure in the moment listening to free jazz, noise, and ambient music, it is ephemeral and soon forgotten. The music that I find memorable, that truly haunts me, has elements of the experimental, but is still fundamentally melodic. My Bloody Valentine might be a good example.

vonjuice 3y ago
> it is ephemeral and soon forgotten. I disagree with this. Complexity is just harder to remember, it requires more attention and more iterations to remember it.

bjornlouser 3y ago

"But most of all Schoenberg was trying too hard to be remembered. Bach, Mozart, Debussy and his predecessors saw themselves as jobbing composers. They knew they had to keep at least one ear moored in audience expectations." But weren't audience expectations tainted by the musical establishment? Debussy (born 1862) won the Prix de Rome, but somehow Ravel (born 1875, one year after Schoenberg) was snubbed for five consecutive years. Something terrible seems to have happened in music schools around the turn of the century. It's hard to blame Schoenberg for wanting to watch it all burn.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

msluyter 3y ago

I majored in flute performance in college, and have listened / played a lot of avante garde music. My roommate, a bass player, and I were really into it at the time. We once played Shoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire on a tape loop over and over for an entire week -- and emerged with our sanity mostly intact. (An interesting side fact is that now I can barely recall it.) I played Luciano Berio's Sequenza on my Sr. recital. In retrospect, I think I was mostly relishing playing the role of enfant terrible, playing weird music just to get a rise out of people. These days I don't willingly listen to atonal music of the Shoenberg/Carter/Boulez variety. I have a variety of theories about why modern classical music tends to be rejected, but in the end, all I can really say is that I have a subjective response to, say, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, that's entirely different from his Movements for Piano & Orchestra.

Tainnor 3y ago
Pierrot Lunaire is pre-dodecaphonic Schönberg, though. I actually find it quite charming, in a way.
gnulinux 3y ago
Luciano Berio's Sequenza aren't traditionally considered serialist (absolutely gorgeous and stunning set of compositions BTW). Although he certainly "sounds" serialist "as a style" the same way Elliot Carter is a "serialist" even though he claims he never used it as a "technique". I really like your point with respect to "Rite of Spring" vs his "Movements for Piano & Orchestra". But let's please note that he likely never attempted to invoke the same kind of vibe anyway, so I don't think it really proves anything. The reality is, composers used serialistic techniques for something other than what neoclassicists wanted to create. For a better comparison, compare Elliot Carter's late piano works with his first piano sonata, which he wanted to write in neoclassical style. You can see the same Carter hue (that's likely more similar to "Movements for Piano & Orchestra" than Stravinsky's "Violin Concerto") in both so it's a more direct comparison in my very humble opinion. With respect to: > why modern classical music tends to be rejected I find this claim that contemporary Western classical music is irrelevant wrong. I think its cultural force is significant. I wrote more about this in HN here [1] if you care to read. But in short, just because an artistic movement inspires artists and not the audience, it doesn't mean it won't indirectly impact the audience, since artists who will go and create mainstream art may be inspired by the innovators of their era. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37424409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37424409

roy-wurlitzer 3y ago

"There is plenty of good music left to be written in C major." - Schoenberg I got that from Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, an accessible history of 20th century composition. I went in ready to dislike Schoenberg but I walked away pretty charmed with him. I don't enjoy listening to any of his serial pieces, but I loved the twinkly little notes that play in Zelda BOTW when you're riding your horse. I don't claim that there's a _direct_ line from 12 tone rows to that, but overall I like living in the post-Schoenberg world where I hear a lot of the "intrepid elements of atonality, pointillist riffs" that the Atlantic author points to.

chongli 3y ago

What do you think about the application of his theory to film scores? I’m immediately reminded of Jerry Goldsmith’s work for Planet of the Apes. Extremely atonal and alien, that score is really effective at putting the audience off-balance and feeling unsettled. I love it!

ajross 3y ago

> The case against serialism is easy. You can make exactly the same case about tonal voice leading rules too. Rules are a "pointless conceit" by definition. "Free atonality" can, again by definition, do anything it wants, including emiting a J. S. Bach fugue or whatever. This is a tautological case. In fact the whole point to music is rules. We have expectations about what we hear and how that works and what it means, and you write "new" music by breaking or bending just a few of them, or otherwise finding ways to do stuff other people haven't. And Schoenberg was trying to find a way to write a new set of rules. It didn't catch on, for the most part, but it wasn't "pointless". You can hear tone rows and learn the rules and "understand" a 12-tone piece in ways that you can't for arbitrary noise. And that's kinda cool.

JasonFruit 3y ago
> You can make exactly the same case about tonal voice leading rules too. You really can't. They aren't laws of nature, but they are based on observation: "When I have two voices proceed in parallel fifths, it's as though one voice ceased to have an independent character. Unless I want that effect, I should avoid that." "When I frustrate a leading tone, it makes the harmonic effect less clear." Schoenberg's system starts with the arbitrary: pick a tone row and use it! But there are rules based on observation there, too: if you use tonal constructions in atonal music, it frustrates the listener's expectations, so don't do that. The ear can recognize the rows when transposed, reversed, and altered by other techniques, so those are good. Serialism is less fully-developed and lacks the deep cultural background of tonal music, but it's not entirely arbitrary either.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  > "When I have two voices proceed in parallel fifths, it's as though one voice ceased to have an independent character." This is partly true, but that rule (as with many other rules of strict composition) originated with purely vocal music which had to be made easy to sing. There's plenty of music for instruments like the piano or the guitar (even literate music, starting from the early 20th c. or so) where consecutive fifths are played all the time and such a "blending" effect is not really heard. Probably a result of timbre (these instruments have a bit of perceptual "roughness" to them that helps prevent a blended tone) as well as musical context (when consecutive fifths are just part of the music, that kind of sound is expected and easier to understand for the listener).

seanhunter 3y ago

From my read of "Theory of Harmony" and "Structural Functions of Harmony", it seems to me Schoenberg definitely wasn't aiming to be a great innovator, he was desperate to be part of the great tradition and saw serialism as an inevitable consequence of the way in which tonality was being stretched further and further in particular by Wagner and Schoenberg's great hero, Mahler. Schoenberg came up with the idea of serialism because he felt there needed to be some sort of formal constraint to give structure to the music in the absence of harmony because he felt the sense of a tonic was being stretched to breaking point anyway and would inevitably fail. People came up with other ways to provide this structure once the whole serialist -> integral serialist process had worked its way through. Saying there's nothing you can't do in serialism you can't do in free atonality seems unfair. Firstly free atonality came about after integral serialism. Secondly, there's nothing you can do in any type of musical composition that you can't do in free atonality, so you may as well say all the things you can do with functional harmony are a worthless constraint. As for popularity - I personally don't think that's an important characteristic at all, but if you do, there are lots of serialist works that are very popular (eg Wozzeck[1]). [1] And I deliberately chose that one rather than say Berg's violin concerto which is also very popular because that's one of the ones that you're accusing of mining serialism for tonal elements