Twelve-Tone Rhythmic Structure and the Electronic Medium

Abstract

To PROCEED from an assertion of what music has been to an assertion of what music, therefore, must be, is to commit a familiar fallacy; to proceed from an assertion of the properties of the electronic medium to an assertion of what music produced by this medium therefore must be, is not only to commit the same fallacy (and thus do fallacies make strange bedfellows), but to misconstrue that compositional revolution of which the electronic medium has been the enabling instrument. For this revolution has effected, summarily and almost completely, a transfer of the limits of musical composition from the limits of the nonelectronic medium and the human performer, not to the limits of this most extensive and flexible of media but to those more restrictive, more intricate, far less well understood limits: the perceptual and conceptual capacities of the human auditor. Therefore, although every musical composition justifiably may be regarded as an experiment, the embodiment of hypotheses as to certain specific conditions of musical coherence, any electronically realized composition which employs resources singularly obtainable by electronic means, in addition, will incorporate-in that Gedankenexperiment which is the mental act of composition--certain premises that are either severely circumscribed by the limited confirmed knowledge of the nature of these capacities or by isolated facts of musical perception, themselves obtained mainly with the assistance of electronic media, for incorporation into the premises of the particular work. Even the composer who employs the RCA Synthesizer, which most conveniently permits the merging and interaction of the Gedanken and the Actual experiments by allowing immediate aural test of the prescribed events at each stage of compositional realization, cannot employ the medium fluently and efficiently by so doing without a sacrifice of all but the most local points of continuity and interrelationship. If more securely founded and ambitiously structured electronic composition is not, then, to halt to await those perhaps long delayed investigations which may, in turn, produce adequately general results only in an unfore-