HISTORY 204 - SERIALISM

(F-11)

1. Serialism

Serialism according to Harvard Dictionary is: "music constructed according to permutations of a group of elements placed in a certain order or series"

Thus 12-tone music is a particular type of serialism - the "group of elements" is the 12 notes of the chromatic scale

People often use “serial” to refer to 12-tone music, but a lot of music that fits the definition above isn’t 12-tone – And in many cases the serial procedures aren't applied to pitch but to other musical elements, especially to rhythm – e.g. mensuration canon,

My definition of “serialism” isn’t standard – Most people restrict it to 12-tone music and its relatives – I feel the broader definition is more useful

I’ll illustrate with 4 pieces, all serial one way or another, but only 2 of them are 12-tone

2. Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953)- String Quartet (1931) - NAWM 156

RCS was stepmother of Pete Seeger, mother of Mike and Peggy Seeger – Also wife of Charles Seeger

American, from Ohio, studied piano in Chicago with Djane Herz – Early compositions influenced by Scriabin – Studied composition with Charles Seeger – Seeger advocated a theory of dissonant counterpoint (compare Paul Hindemith, Henry Cowell) – In 30s she switched from composition to folksong collecting (motivated by politics like Copland) - Died young of cancer

String quartet was composed during a study year in Europe – It puts ideas of dissonant counterpoint into practice

Last movement is serial in several ways - HANDOUT

based on series of 10 notes – played by 3 lower instruments over and over

Series is “rotated” – i.e. each time it’s repeated the first note is moved to the end (this is a “permutation” of the group of elements)

m.3 :D E F Eb F# A Ab G Db C

m.4: E F Eb F# A Ab G Db C D

m.7: F Eb F# A Ab G Db C D E . . . etc

After complete rotation (i.e. 10 repetitions) series is transposed up a step – Repeated 10 more times

m.21: E F# G F Ab B Bb A Eb D

m.23: F# G F Ab B Bb A Eb D E

m.25: G F Ab B Bb A Eb D E F# . . . etc

Meanwhile violin 1 plays non-serial pitches – freely chosen so far as I can tell

Serial rhythmic procedure – lower instruments begin with rhythmic group of 20 notes – then 19, etc – Meanwhile V.1 begins with 1 note and adds notes up to 21

Serial dynamic procedure (very simple) – The more notes the softer, the fewer notes the louder

At 59 measures the instruments have traded places and everyone holds his note

Then the entire piece is played in reverse (transposed up a half step) – pitches, rhythms, dynamics (retrograde is also a serial procedure!)

PLAY – You hear most of these procedures very clearly whether or not you know about them in advance

Compare this to Schoenberg’s serialism, where serial procedures are basis of the composition, but they’re not particularly audible –The procedures you hear in Schoenberg are standard procedures: motivic work, counterpoint, variation, etc. – The role of serial procedures in Schoenberg is to guarantee the emancipation of dissonance – Is there any special virtue to serial procedures being audible?

3. Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) – Quartet for the End of Time (1941)

Messiaen was organist at the Trinité in Paris and taught at the Conservatoire – Very influential on postwar generation of composers – Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis were all his students

Messiaen rejected or at least wasn’t very interested in 12-tone harmonic system – But he was very interested in serial procedures as a way of replacing traditional musical gestures – Especially serial rhythms and serial operations on groups of pitches

Idiosyncratic interests and musical style

Christian theology

ornithology (birds)

modes of limited transposition,

additive rhythms, non-retrogradable rhythms

color-pitch-mode synesthesia

Birds, modes, rhythms all had religious significance for Messiaen – e.g. birdsongs are divine utterances, non-retrogradable rhythms are preview of eternity, etc.

Quartet for the End of Time was composed in a German POW camp – The scoring was determined by the musicians who happened to have been captured – “End of Time” refers to rhythmic procedures that aren’t governed by 2-4-8-16 division of time in music – Grout: rhythms of “duration not meter” – Also refers to the “End of time” of Christian theology

HANDOUT– Cello and piano each repeat a distinctive rhythmic pattern – Cello ostinato made up of two “non-retrogradable rhythms” (a rhythm that’s the same forward and backward – i.e. a palindrome) - Messiaen thinks these rhythms create a sense of timelessness - rhythms of all the instruments eliminate meter and cut across bar lines

Melodic materials – cello has repeating melody that coincides with the rhythmic pattern – piano has repeating sequence of 29 chords that does not coincide with its rhythmic pattern – Clarinet and violin play bird songs (clarinet is nightingale, violin is blackbird)

Mode – Not 12-tone, and not exactly atonal – but keys never clearly established (is Liturgy in Bb?) – uses system of "modes" – Liturgy is mainly octatonic and whole tone – Different instruments have different modes

Melodies and rhythms in cello and piano are SERIAL – “group of elements in a series” – in this case no permutations, just repetition in a very intricate way – Similar to color and talea in medieval music

PLAY

Messiaen vs. Seeger

Both Messiaen and Seeger treat melody and rhythm serially

Neither uses 12-tone serialism

You can hear serial processes clearly in Seeger – You probably can’t hear them at all in Messiaen

Messiaen uses serial procedures for a (religious) purpose: to suspend time and approach eternity

4. Postwar success of serialism

In 20's and 30's, Schoenberg and his school were only one of many competing trends and were pretty much in decline during 30's and 40's -- No one would have predicted that music history would ascribe them such a decisive role

After WW II 12-tone composition rapidly gained an ascendancy, which it maintained through the 50's and 60's --People composed music in other styles, especially if they had already been composing before the war (e.g. Shostakovich, Vaughan-Williams, Varese), but serialism dominated "new music" – Especially in the U.S. where it maintained its control much longer than in Europe

Why? Jen DeLapp’s theory that this was tied in with the Cold War - To oppose Socialist Realism, the U.S. government felt obliged to sponsor "formalism" in the arts - Atonal music and abstract expressionist painting showed how "free" everyone was in the West

Some post-war serialists were young composers like Boulez and Stockhausen, others were converts like Stravinsky, Sessions and Copland – Most went in for some version of Schoenberg’s 12-tone serialism

“ultra”-serialism or “total” serialism – means treating other musical parameters serially, not just pitch – e.g. rhythms, orchestration, register, dynamics –We saw this in Seeger, where scoring, dynamics, etc. were all treated serially – The ideal was to derive everything about the piece from the same series

5. Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) – Kreuzspiel (1951)

Much more complex serial procedures

Pitch, register, dynamics, timbres are all "constructed according to permutations of a group of elements placed in a certain order or series"

The series itself is permuted in a complex way – no longer I, R, RI and exchange of hexachords

Even more than previous examples, these serial procedures must be inaudible

One of the first pieces Stockhausen composed – Before this he had composed some "classical" 12-tone pieces and had studied in Paris with Olivier Messiaen (alongside Pierre Boulez) – Like Messiaen, Stockhausen was a fervent Catholic and believed that man approaches God through music – Stockhausen's starting point was Messiaen's "Modes de valeurs et d'intensités" (1948), an etude for piano which treated duration and dynamics according to the same serial principles

Kreuzspiel is scored for piano, oboe, bass clarinet and 3 percussionists – It has 3 parts, of which the NAWM score has only the first (with its introduction)

Kreuzspiel means "Crossplay" – This refers to many kinds of crossing patterns in the piece, the most audible (?) of which is register crossing – In part I pitches introduced in a very high register migrate over the course of a section to a very low register; pitches introduced in a low register migrate to a high register – extreme registers are on the piano, middle registers are in the oboe and bass clarinet – In part II pitches are introduced in the middle register and move outwards

PLAY from beginning – Do you hear pitches changing register? – I never do – Are you more likely to hear it if you have perfect pitch?

Is there anything appealing about the sound of the piece?

Piece is based on a 12-tone row – HANDOUT

The row also regulates duration and dynamics – For example Db will always be played mf and will always last for 5 triplet 16ths until the next note (C) is heard

Transformations of row also follow "cross" pattern – HANDOUT (part 1) – pitches are rotated in systematic but complex pattern so that each statement of the row is in a very different pitch order from previous statement – This means that duration and dynamics will also follow this "cross" pattern

Percussion instruments have a durational scheme based on a different series, but it is rotated through the same "cross" pattern as shown

the analysis of part I from NAWM is pretty good, but more than you want to know – You're responsible only for the general principles, not for the details of how Stockhausen executes these principles

PLAY from 2:50 (Part II)

What is the effect of all this serial control (overdetermination)?

What you hear seems random – You can't hear the row or its transformations – You can't form any expectations (perhaps a computer could have expectations) – You're not hearing Stockhausen's ideas or compositional choices

Did Stockhausen make any choices? - Yes many: "cross" concept, 3-part structure, instrumentation, open textures, lack of chordal sonorities (pointillist), etc. etc. – plus a few changes of pitches and dynamics that seem to be whimsical

Do we have any way to judge whether they were good or bad choices?

What is it like to perform this kind of music?

Very difficult, no way to tell whether you're right or wrong, no feeling that you're expressing Stockhausen's ideas or emotions (much less your own)

Do you get to a point where it "sounds right"?

5. Stravinsky: Agon (1957) –

Ballet for George Balanchine at NY City Ballet – They had collaborated previously on Apollo (Paris, 1928) and Orpheus (NY, 1948) – not 100% 12-tone – Mixes 12-tone and tonal music – sometimes separate, sometimes overlapping – Basic trajectory is from tonal to serial and back to tonal at the very end

Boulez characterized Agon as a journey through music history from tonality to serialism and back -- Begins in C - Tonality gets more and more problematic – Becomes 12-tone about 2/3-way through - original material C-major emerges again at end

No story line – Balanchine characteristically choreographed abstract ideas, not stories - Music is "about" the dance, particularly about the "contest" of male vs. female dancers (compare Rite!)

Overall shape: The more dancers, the more tonal, the fewer dancers, the more 12-tone – Climax is pas de deux: 2 dancers, completely 12-tone – Also brass tends to go with male dancers, woodwind with female (in general)

PLAY Pas de 4 (p.1) -- Listen for Stravinsky fingerprints:

Insistence on C tonality

Steady 8^th note rhythm, shifting signatures

Octatonic scales

Trumpet lick from Rite of Spring

Coda I (p.40) - HANDOUT - This is first 12-tone movement – But it mixes 12-tone and tonal techniques – some instruments are mostly tonal (violin, trumpet), some are mostly atonal (piano, trombones, flutes)

Only prime form of row is used, no transpositions

P₀ in m.185, 191

I₀ in 190 (flutes)

R₀ in 208

Row is conjunct – mostly half and whole steps – But Stravinsky displaces the octaves, so it sounds disjunct

PLAY beginning – What’s unusual about how row is used? – Stravinsky repeats notes before you’ve heard them all [bracketed notes in cello part] – You’ll find repetition also in m.204

Massive repetition from m. 211 on, pretty much a literal recap in the same scoring – This is very contrary to Schoenberg’s principle of “developing variation,” but it makes it a lot easier for the listener to hear what’s happening

Klangfarben technique – Row is characteristically shared by pairs of instruments: harp/cello, piano/trombone, flute/flute – technique was developed by Webern – Other mannerisms borrowed from Webern scoring – harmonics, fluttertongue, use of plucked instruments

PLAY – CD 9 - What is violin doing? – Still playing in C major – Mandolin and trumpet are often (though not always) tonal too

(if time) PLAY VHS

How does the dance style compare to Petrushka or Rite?

How does it fit in with abstraction of 12-tone music?

The dance is about music . . . The music is about dance . . .