The Spread Of Serialism

Abstract

Abstract As ‘the Second Viennese School’, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern are conventionally accorded collective credit for the establishment of the twelve-note technique as an important factor in twentieth-century music, and the story of composition since 1950 is largely one of reactions to that factor—positive, negative, equivocal. Whereas Webern, and Schoenberg in some of his late works, indicated the basis for a fuller exploration of the conjunction between strict serial technique and atonal expressionism, Schoenberg’s earlier serial pieces, and all those by Berg, opened up the very different prospect of associations between traditional forms and procedures and twelve-note methods which involved tension as well as connection. The continued influence and development of twelve-note composition after 1950 therefore helped to intensify the already vigorous pluralism of style and aesthetic that had been evident in twentieth-century music from the beginning, and most composers of significance who have emerged since mid-century have been concerned to some extent with the basic principle of consistently ordered pitch structuring (though often with fewer, or more than twelve notes) that lies at the heart of the Schoen-bergian concept. Such composers will feature in all the later chapters of this study, illustrating the extreme diversity to which types of serial thinking, in a post-tonal context, can give rise.