Twelve-tone Composition Research Articles

Reflections on Rochberg and "Postmodernism"

Reflections on Rochberg and "Postmodernism" tetTfcl JamesWierzbicki i Commenting on the "postmodernist turn in music," Richard Taruskin in his voluminous new Oxford History ofWestern Music declares that the "story begins (or we can begin effectively to tell it) with the firstperformance, on 15May 1972, of the String Quartet no. 3 by George Rochberg."1 In 1972 "postmodernism" had yet to enter the vocabulary ofAmerican cultural commentators, but by the early 1980s it had become a buzz word.2 Soon the label was applied toRochberg, and Rochberg vehemently opposed it. In an essay that triggered a blustery debate within the pages of the journal Critical Inquiry, he articulated the "simple enough" reasons forhis objection: Reflections on Rochberg and "Postmodernism" 109 While I acknowledge the purely temporal sense inwhich the term is used, it ishardly that fact alone which is sufficientfor acquiescing to a term in which the word "modernism" remains embedded and which is intended, I suppose, to describe, referto, indicate those col lective effortsalready set inmotion which are attempting to create a new and more balanced culture, one which must base itselfagain on the past and its relation to the present and the recognition of the validity of continuity. In this sense, itwould be better to invent a new term, and ifone does not come to mind quickly or easily, it would be just as well to get along without a label while we get on with themain business at hand.3 The word was problematic for Rochberg mostly because its root posed "a constant reminder of the sickness of spiritwhich themodern movement engendered, of the loss of values itbrought on, of the imbal ances it caused."4 Vis-?-vis modernism and all that it implied, Rochberg had no use for such a reminder. Once a champion ofmodernism, in the 1960s he found himself caught painfully between modernism's demands and dictates from his artistic conscience.5 Although his writings from the early 1970s resonate with conflicted thoughts, Rochberg nonetheless believed thatwith his Third Quartet he had at last escaped the dilemma. After a long and emotionally tortuous period that he called his "time of turning," Rochberg was convinced that by means of the Third Quartet he had started to move beyond modernism.6 By the time "postmod ernism" came into fashion, Rochberg had made bold strides along his chosen path. Chronology notwithstanding, there was simply no point, he felt, in affixing to his currentwork a tag that smacked of a backward glance. Rochberg died on 28 May 2005. Surely the passing of a prominent American composer warrants new evaluations of his output as a whole, but this essay has only a narrow focus. Prompted by Taruskin's recent pronouncement that the story of musical postmodernism begins with Rochberg's 1972 Third Quartet, the goal here is to suggest that amuch more prophetic model formusical postmodernism can be found in a work for chamber orchestra thatRochberg completed relatively early in his "time of turning." Before discussing Rochberg's 1965 Music for the Magic Theater, however, it is necessary to put into perspective both Rochberg's pre-1965 career and the still slippery concept of musical postmodernism. MO PerspectivesofNew Music II It iswith a curious conceit thatRochberg begins his 1973 "Reflections on Schoenberg," a rambling appreciation published in this journal on the eve of the Schoenberg centennial. In a literaryflourish that at the time must have shocked at least some readers of Perspectives ofNew Music, he likens Schoenberg to awerewolf. Rochberg makes no reference to lycanthropic transformation of the sort enacted by Lon Chaney Jr. so famously in the movies. For Rochberg, therewas nothing moonstruck about Schoenberg's dramatic leap from the safe ground of functional harmony into the atonal vocabu laryof Pierrot Lunaire, nothing so pernicious in Schoenberg's method of twelve-tone composition that itwarranted curing with the musical equivalent of a silver bullet. Rochberg did not compare Schoenberg to a creature occasionally fanged and hairy; the comparison, rather, is to Harry Haller, the central character of Hermann Hesse's 1927 novel Steppenwolf Quoting directly from the preface to the 1963 English-language edi tion of the novel, Rochberg notes thatHesse's protagonist, who truly believed that his human...

Computer-Assisted Analysis of Music in George Perle's System of Twelve-Tone Tonality

53 Music theorists face many challenges when analyzing music written according to George Perle’s compositional theory of twelve-tone tonality, a system based on inversional symmetry. Analysts focusing on Mr. Perle’s music seek relationships among collections of notes in an effort to discover connections within and across a specific work. It is often possible to rely solely on the analytical tools of twelve-tone tonality when working with Mr. Perle’s music, but in many instances other tools have proven rather useful, such as can be found in pitchclass set theory and transformational theory. The interested reader may refer to a number of excellent resources to acquire a working knowledge of these theories (Forte 1973; Rahn 1980; Lewin 1987; Straus 2005). However, in some cases even these theories do not assist the analyst in generating meaningful results from the pitch material in a twelve-tone tonal composition. Because Mr. Perle’s music is non-tonal, it lends itself particularly well to computer-assisted mathematical anlysis. We have developed a simple computer application, Twelve-Tone Tonality Reverse Engineer, or T3RevEng, that helps determine the organization and context of the material, based on the input of pitch classes expressed as integers. In all tests thus far, T3RevEng has proven to be an essential tool for the Perlean analyst owing to its comprehensive, efficient, and accurate manipulation of data.

Schoenberg, Boulez, and Twelve-Tone Composition as “Ideal Type”

Abstract Twelve-tone music is often defined empirically, in generalized terms of compositional practice. I contend that historians and theorists have neglected a heuristic perspective of twelve-tone composition. One heuristic model proves particularly helpful: the “ideal type,” first described by social scientist Max Weber in “Objectivity' in Social Science and Social Policy” (1904). Weber's ideal type can help to move the discussion away from scientistic ideas of problem solving and overly abstract invocations of “the twelve-tone idea,” and toward what Weber would call the “cultural significance” of twelve-tone methodologies (a move in line with influential revisions to the historiography of scientific “problem solving” proposed by Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos). Differences of perspective between Arnold Schoenberg and the young Pierre Boulez, at about the time the latter first arrived at Darmstadt, highlight the difficulty in establishing a coherent history of twelve-tone compositional practice (as opposed to a heuristic “ideal type”). The anonymous typescript “Komposition mit zwöölf Töönen,” linked with Schoenberg's Viennese circle of the early 1920s, reveals how the early twelve-tone “discovery” described by Schoenberg is, no less than the later descriptions by Boulez, an a posteriori construct—or, as Kuhn and Lakatos might say, an ideological colonization of past practice.

The Arnold Schoenberg Companion

Preface Context Changing Views of Schoenberg by Walter B. Bailey Biography by Walter B. Bailey Music List of Works by Walter B. Bailey and Jerry McBride Schoenberg's Tonal Beginnings by Walter B. Bailey The Atonal Period in Schoenberg's Music by Leonard Stein The Evolution of the Twelve-tone Method by Ethan Haimo The Mature Twelve-tone Method by Ethan Haimo The Late Twelve-tone Compositions by Ethan Haimo Schoenberg's Late Tonal Works by Jan Maegaard Legacy Schoenberg's Theory of Composition by Patricia Carpenter Schoenberg: The Analyst and the Analyzed by Bryan R. Simms Schoenberg as Teacher by Leonard Stein Schoenberg's Influence by Gunther Schuller Selective Bibliography by Jerry McBride Selective Discography by Jerry McBride Index

In Schoenberg's Workshop: Aggregates and Referential Collections in "Die glückliche Hand"

Schoenberg's identification of the fragmentary symphony (1914–15) as the “first step” toward twelve-tone composition has obscured important connections with Die glückliche Hand, op. 18 (1910–13). Twelve-note collections with octave doubling as well as aggregate statements play a significant role in the sketches and completed score. Anticipating the technique of “working with tones of the motif,” Schoenberg established referential collections of pitch classes from which melodic and harmonic material could be generated. Awareness of the range of his compositional procedures in op. 18 can clarify Schoenberg's development in the years before WWI and beyond.

An Interview with Paul Lansky

Cody: Mr. Lansky, you studied twelve-tone composition with Milton Babbitt, and you earlier studied with George Perle, who had a more idiosyncratic application of the twelve-tone method. What is your relationship to twelve-tone composition in general? Was there a specific rapport between those theoretical advances and the advances that electronic and computer music made in the 1950s and 1960s? Lansky: I got involved in computers at a time and place where the prime motivation for doing so was that we thought it was going to be a way in which the properties of the twelve-tone system could be more deeply investigated. The idea was that with computers, one could perform very complicated structural manipulations of sets, rhythms, timbres, and other things that one could never possibly do with instruments. The interesting thing for me was that as soon as I started to do that, I lost interest in it. It was probably the computer, more than anything else, that led me away from twelve-tone music, because as I started to use it, I noticed that anything I did on the computer was much less interesting than the most primitive sounds somebody could make scraping on a violin. Consequently, constructing complex pitch relations became much less challenging and exciting than trying to get a handle on the guts of musical sound itself. (Or perhaps I wasn't meant to juggle more than three balls at a time.) And so I got involved in the early and mid-1970s in using the computer as a sort of lens on the sounds of the world, but it certainly was the excitement of serialism in the sixties that led me to use the computer. Cody: As far as your training, did you become interested in computer music as a musician? I know you were a French horn player, but as far as composition, did you begin studying quite traditionally? How did you originally involve yourself in electronic music?

Webern, Tradition, and "Composing with Twelve Tones..."

Anton Webern's twelve-tone music displays many surface features in common with those of tonal forms, yet his works are based on a fundamentally different musical grammar. This has led certain analysts to conclude that there is a hiatus between his music's lan- guage and its large-scale structure. A closer reading suggests, how- ever, that Webern's forms derive in sensible ways from his under- lying pitch language, and that their similarities to tonal forms arise from the fact that both tonal and twelve-tone grammars permit sim- ilar narrative strategies. This point is explored in analyses of three movements that display similarities to tonal binary and sonata- allegro forms-the second movement of Op. 27, the first movement of Op. 22, and the finale of Op. 20. ton Webern's a proach to composition as well, and may en as g od advice to those who would analyze his work. i ore Webern's obvious debt t compositional tradition er to emphasize the radical nature of his twelve-tone age diminishes our apprec ation of his treatment of , as much as do analy es that ca only hear his use of i ional forms in terms of their surfac gestures, nd are to the ways those forms emerge from his reatment of structure. As the pr ceding analyses have attemp ed to est, ebern's twelve-tone compositions show a rich in- ation of details into their large-scale forms, employing ionships drawn from throughout the twelve-tone system. si ilarities in his music to tonal forms are not simply the lt of superficial modeling, but spring from a deeper level, at hich the relational properties of the two grammars si ilar na rative patterns to grow. In ways that should ti ue to engage an delight us, Webern from the very start s o n a d ep understanding of Schoenberg's new pro- e in musical construction w ich se med fit ed to replace e structural di ferentiations provided formerly by tonal 59Schoenberg, Composition with Twelve Tones, 217-18. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.172 on Fri, 07 Oct 2016 05:50:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Some Analytical Comments on Text and Music in Martino's "Alone"

DONALD MARTINO PUBLISHED HIS Three Songs for soprano or tenor voice and piano in 1970; Alone, however, the first of these songs, was actually composed in 1955 and was Martino's first twelve-tone composition. The texts are all poems of James Joyce, from the collection Pomes Penyeach. The latter, published by Shakespeare and Company (Paris) in 1927, is, in contrast to the collection Chamber Music, a miscellaneous collection of poems, written over a span of some twenty years.2 Literary critics and theorists have tended to ignore this collection, or disparage it. I failed to find any discussion of it in any issue of the James Joyce Quarterly between its founding (in 1963) and the present. I know of no books on the collection, or published articles. Selwyn Jackson, in his monograph The Poems of James Joyce, discusses a few of the poems in this collection, but he does not even mention Alone, the poem in question.3

The State of Research in Twelve-Tone and Atonal Theory

The study of twelve-tone and atonal music is a young discipline, because its subject, as music history goes, is a very recent arrival upon the scene. We measure our tradition in decades, rather than centuries, and, various spurious obituary notices to the contrary, twelve-tone composition is still a vital, if not particularly audible, part of today's musical culture. Thus, our subject is not easily subjugated, and its constant expansion defies circumscription. However, the very vitality of our subject has itself spawned a lively and diverse body of thought abut twelve-tone and atonal music, in large part because so many of the participants wear two hats. We need only remember that two of the brightest lights of the twelve-tone theoretical firmament are Arnold Schoenberg and Milton Babbitt to remind us that many of the proponents of twelve-tone and atonal music are themselves practitioners. The result is a wealth of engaging musical thought that ranges from considerations of the most general issues to the equivalent of a proud parent exhibiting photographs of its most recent offspring. In trying to offer an overview of the current state of research in twelve-tone and atonal theory I can only provide a personal perspective, colored by my affinities and preoccupations as a general proponent of this music, and admittedly infected by my own parental biases and enthusiasms. Nevertheless, I hope the following notes will provide a scaffold from which to view the growing edifice, bearing in mind that scaffolds are built to be dismantled when they are no longer useful. I find it useful to divide twelve-tone and atonal theory into four broad areas of concern. Most writings on twelve-tone and atonal music tend to concentrate on fewer than all of them, but in most cases tacit assumptions about the others may be inferred. These four areas will give us a way of viewing the wealth of articles that have appeared over the past several years, and will also allow me to highlight some of the issues addressed. My first area of concern is the parsing of the musical surface, the basic process of grouping events as intelligible entities. As we shall observe later, this is by no means a simple problem, although it is possible to get a great deal of analytical mileage by using common sense. The critical importance of considering surface grouping structures is brought out in a number of writings in explicit ways. William Benjamin is assiduous in this regard in Ideas of Order in Motivic Music, as is Stephen Peles in Interpretations of Sets in Multiple Dimensions: Notes on the Second Movement of Arnold Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 3. Interpretation of the musical surface has been a central concern of Christopher Hasty, who most recently articulated it in his presentation at the 1986 SMT conference, Material and Form in Webern's Twelve-Tone Music. but whose other writ-

The Format and Function of Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Sketches

N DESCRIBING HIS METHOD Of twelve-tone composition, Schoenberg no longer asserts, as he did for his atonal compositions, that he composed ecstatically, transported by the first direct contact with the sound of the beginning.' Instead he speaks of conscious control of the new means and by the composer, who seeks to know consciously the laws and rules which govern the forms which he has conceived 'as in a dream.' 2 This distinction between the unconscious

The Abolition of Thematicism and the Structural Meaning of the Method of Twelve-Tone Composition

The structural significance of the Method of Composing with Twelve Tones is expressed in the following statements by Arnold Schoenberg in ‘Composition with Twelve Tones’ (Style and Idea, Williams & Norgate Ltd., London, p. 107):After many unsuccessful attempts during a period of approximately twelve years, I laid the foundation for a new procedure in musical construction which seemed fitted to replace those structural differentiations provided formerly by tonal harmonies. I called this procedure Method of Composing with Twelve Tones which are related only with one another.

Josef Matthias Hauer (1883–1959)

It is fairly safe to say that if anything is known about the composer Josef Matthias Hauer outside the German-speaking world it is that he was a contemporary of Schoenberg and that, like Schoenberg, he wrote music which employed the twelve-tone method. If anything else is known, it probably is that there was and still is great controversy over who was first to employ this method of composition. Perhaps this article will call into question our unthinking amalgamation of these two composers into the camp of twelve-tone composition.

Segmental Invariance and the Twelve-Tone System

forms of a set is an important aspect of twelve-tone composition. The significance of this statement should be obvious to anyone who has studied only a few of the twelve-tone works of Schoenberg and Webern. Specific examples of the compositional realization of such relationships have been cited in the literature, and a few articles contain detailed information on certain aspects of segmental invariance.' However, none of these sources offers a systematic explanation of those operations of the system that produce invariant segments between a twelve-tone set and its various transformations. The purpose of this article is to provide a detailed account of these operations. Whether or not a composer like Schoenberg fully understood the operations and potentialities of the twelve-tone system is debatable. Certainly he was aware of the compositional significance of relationships which result from the operations of the system. A clear instance of this awareness

Serial Composition and Atonality

UP TO NO W, the few available books attempting to deal generally with atonal and twelve-tone music have consistently failed to reveal any awareness of the significant approaches recently developed to the fundamental theoretic, analytic, and compositional implications of systematic pitch organization. For the most part, these works offer little beyond routine restatement of the traditional rules of procedure originally propounded as guide lines during the early stages of twelvetone composition, which in practice almost immediately underwent extensive modification, and analyses consisting primarily of simple set identifications and note counting. The triviality of the actual material presented is often masked behind pretentious metaphysical and pseudohistorical, pseudoscientific justifications whose origin is in those similar statements by Schoenberg that constitute the least fruitful aspect of his thought. This preponderance is particularly lamentable in view of the defenselessness of many readers against the fallacies and misconceptions that abound in such facile productions. Most of the genuinely rigorous thought in this field has been presented in articles of a highly specialized nature which are either inaccessible or require for their comprehension a degree of prior experience and training that is, to say the least, far from prevalent even among professional musicians. As a result, an important, perhaps the most important, development in contemporary musical thought has taken place and is rapidly expanding out of reach, in the absence of a comprehensive general statement of its principles and attitudes, of the majority of those for whom it has the greatest interest and consequence. The present book takes an important step toward supplying this deficiency by examining classical atonal and twelve-tone works in terms of their relation to some of the central concerns by which current theoretical work is motivated. Serial Composition and Atonality is, within this general realm, a personal approach that focuses on issues and instances that seem of particular importance to the author. Perle's deep and productive involvement, as composer and analyst, with this

A Short Introduction to the Technique of Twelve-Tone Composition

A Short Introduction to the Technique of Twelve-Tone Composition