Is Twelve-Tone Music Artistically Defective?

Abstract

abstracting from the music. If they do not learn the specific order ofthe prime form of a row, how are they recognizing permutations (inversion, ret-rograde, etc.) of the prime form as such? Here one wonders whether the fact thatonly two rows were used in this study made the various tasks artificially easy.I want to mention also some experiments designed to test Allen Forte’s well-known theory of the pitch structure of atonal (not necessarily twelve-tone) music.While the structures Forte discusses differ from those specified by Schoenberg,they equally avoid any implication of tonal center. Hence as far as the psychol-ogy of perception is concerned, the results of these experiments are likely to beinformative.Gibson (1985) tested 198 subjects, of whom 173 were university music stu-dents or faculty; 63 of the latter group were experienced with the atonal idiom.Each trial consisted of the presentation of two pairs of chords, in which themembers of one pair were highly similar in pitch content according to Forte’sanalysis, while the members of the other pair were highly different (indeed, com-plementary). The subjects’ task on each trial was to say “which pair sounds moredifferent.”Gibson discovered that even his expert listeners were unable to performthis task. (Also, contrary to what Krumhansl and her colleagues found, Gibson’ssubjects did less well when stimuli were presented in a musical context than whenthey were presented neutrally.) He concludes:“[these] results...strongly suggestthat the relationships presented in this experiment do not present the aural cor-relate of their theoretical associations to listeners” (1985, p. 21). In a subsequentpaper reporting similar results from another experiment (1993), Gibson writes that the “overall evidence suggested that neither maximum pc similarity (pc setidentity) nor maximum pc dissimilarity (literal complementation) was capable of projecting its aural correlate to auditors....[I]t seems clear that theoreticalspeculation is not always reflected in aural experience” (1993, p. 23).