The making of musical extremism : the monsters and the critics of total serialism

Abstract

The composer Arnold Schoenberg developed what was to become the twelve-tone or dodecaphonic system throughout the 1920s with his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern. After World War II, there was a renewed interest in this previously esoteric and little-known compositional method, especially in America, where Schoenberg had emigrated and was now working as a prominent composition professor. In Europe, however, various influential figures in what came to be known as the avant-garde determined that Anton Webern had superseded his teacher in clarity of form and style. Concretely: in Webern the rows of 12 notes that formed the basis of dodecaphonic composition were not constructed thematically (as seemed to be the case with Schoenberg and Berg, and was indeed the case with later dodecaphonists like René Liebowitz, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Roger Sessions) but rather determined by certain structural characteristics within the row itself (symmetry, concision, etc). Additionally, a number of Webern’s pieces (such as the Symphony, op. 21) display a sensitivity towards multiple parameters of composition which appear to be treated independently. Together with a piece by Olivier Messiaen, Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (which, strictly speaking, is not serial but modal), these stylistic tendencies are seen as the groundwork for what became the musical avant-garde of the post-war period, culminating in the international fame of the so-called “Darmstadt school” of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, and Pierre Boulez. The composers we consider here are far more obscure, and perhaps because of this almost exclusively described by Anglo-American historians in terms of these more famous counterparts. Our interest here is how this muscicological "back-formation" misrepresents the very objects it is attempting to promote.