Talk:Serialism

Serialism vs twelve tone

I've scribbled a bit about the problems of this subject before on Talk:Tone row, but I thought it best that I try to quickly explain the changes I just made here:

Serialism and twelve-note music are not strictly speaking the same thing. Twelve-note music is a subset of serialism, really. It doesn't make sense to speak of the two as the same, because you might have a serial piece which uses a scale with 41 notes to the octave and serialises them - such a piece is serial, but not twelve-note music in any sense. Likewise, you might have a piece that serialises dynamics, durations, accents and instrumentation, but not pitches - such a piece would also be serial, but not twelve-note music. This is a bit of a chewy problem, because the best known serial composers (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern) serialised only pitches, and so the two terms become confused. However, there's no question of somebody calling a totally serialised work like Pierre Boulez' Polyphonie X "twelve-note music" - it's serial, and that's all there is to it.

Here's a quote from the Harvard Dictionary of Music which I just copied from [1] (http://members.aol.com/smaque/music1/), which probably puts the problem better than I could:

"[serial music is] music constructed according to permutations of a group of elements placed in a certain order or series. These elements may include pitches, durations, or virtually any other musical values. Strictly speaking, serial music encompasses twelve-tone music as well as music employing other types of pitch series, ie., those containing fewer than twelve pitches (e.g., certain "pre-twelve-tone" movements from Schoenberg's Five Piano Pieces op. 23 and Serenade op. 24; Stravinsky's In Memoriam Dylan Thomas) and those containing more than twelve pitches (e.g., Messiaen's Quator pour la fin du temps). Normally, however, the term is reserved for music that extends classical Schoenbergian twelve-tone pitch techniques and, especially, applies serial control to other musical elements, such as duration. Such music, mainly developed after World War II (although there were also earlier tendencies in this direction, notably in the music of Berg and Cowell), is often distinguished from twelve-tone serialism as "integral" or "total" serialism. It is usually characterized by a high degree of precompositional planning and thus also of compositional determinacy.

OK, after all that, the other edits I made are quite simple: first, serial music is not always atonal - quite a lot of Berg's serial passages, for instance, are definitely in a certain key. Secondly, I don't think Stravinsky's Fanfare for a New Theatre is a good example of a serial composition: it's a pretty small piece for just two trumpets, which hardly ever gets heard. Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra is a far better known piece (as well as being an excellent example of what you can do with the twelve-note technique). --Camembert

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OK, I've finally taken the plunge and moved the specifically 12-tone stuff (which was most of the article) to twelve-tone technique. Hopefully I'll be able to expand this article soon. --Camembert 19:33 Apr 21, 2003 (UTC)

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Nono and Cage

Two quick notes/questions: 1. Did Luigi Nono develop serial principles really that independently? As far as I know he regularly attended to the "Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik" in Darmstadt, meeting there with Stockhausen and even Boulez. 2. It seems that John Cage (sic!) had some influence on the delopment of serialism. Unfortunately the only source I have for that right now is an interview with the musical historian Reinhold Brinkmann (Harvard) in German <URL: http://www.beckmesser.de/themen/brink/int.html>. Here is the relevant part of the interview with an English translation by me below:

"Unter musikgeschichtlichen Gesichtspunkten muss heute auch einer Figur wie John Cage zentrale Bedeutung für die Entwicklung im frühen Nachkriegseuropa beigemessen werden; nach dem kürzlich veröffentlichten Briefwechsel zwischen Cage und Boulez muss er als einer Väter der seriellen Musik betrachtet werden, denn er hat bestimmte kompositionstechnische Verfahren mit Boulez besprochen, die dann direkt in die serielle Technik eingegangen sind. Man müsste eigentlich die Musikgeschichte von dieser internationalen Perspektive aus neu schreiben."

"From the point of view of musical history one must realize that even a figure like John Cage had a central role in the development in the early post-war-Europe; following the recently published exchange of letters between Cage and Boule, he has to be acknowledged as being one of the fathers of serial music, because he discussed with Boulez certain aspects of composition technique which directly became part of serial technique. Actually the history of music would have to be rewritten from this international perspective [a perspective which takes the influence of American composers on musical development in post-war Europe into account; Utis]"

That said, I am not sure whether Brinkmann puts such an emphasis on it, just because he wants to make a point. Thus, I am not arguing for including it into the main article yet, not without further recherche/evidence. But I thought it might be worth mentioning here on the talk page.

-- Utis 01:19, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Goeyvaerts

This page needs to include Goeyvaerts.

That's Karel Goeyvaerts. Hyacinth 01:25, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)