Total Serialism and the Darmstadt School

[James]

As a matter of interest to those with a heightened sense of curiosity, and since the forum has been experiencing a flurry of activity and controversy, typical heated debate over Schoenberg, the crisis of tonality, the 2nd Vienesse school, and the influence & impact on the following generation of composers etc.

The revolution which swept through Western classical music in the aftermath of World War II is inextricably associated with the small German town of Darmstadt, whose summer music school acted for a few years during the 1950s as the ideological headquarters of the new avant-garde movement, the so-called Darmstadt School. Darmstadt's leading protagonists were Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen & Luigi Nono, three composers who - despite the different musical paths they would subsequently follow - found themselves briefly united in their common search for a musical language which would break decisively with the past, establishing a fresh method & aesthetic.

The group's point of departure was Arnold Schoenberg's system of 12-note composition, though their guiding inspiration was not Schoenberg (who's music they regarded as being too bound up with the essentially retrospective German tradition) but the austere work of his pupil Anton Webern, in whose pared-down musical language and obsessive quest for forms of quasi-mathematical purity they saw the germ of a new aesthetic. The 12-note system took as its starting point the idea that a piece of music could be based on a fixed sequence of musical pitches, obviating the need to work with traditional harmonies. Taking up a suggestion first mooted by Messiaen in his piano piece Mode de valeurs et d'intensites, Boulez argued that just as pitch could be numerically ordered, so too could every other compositional element, including rhythm, dynamics & register - thus producing a kind of automatic music which would permanently break free from the European musical inheritance. Boulez went on to expound this method, known as total serialism, in his seminal Structures for two pianos (1951), whose first movement represents the style at it's purest, while Stockhausen, in works such as Kontrapunkte & Zeitmasze, and Nono, in Il Canto Sospeso, followed his lead.

In fact, total serialism proved to be more of a gateway into a new way of writing and thinking about music than an end in itself. Boulez himself immediately tired of the robotic automatism of Structures, while both Stockhausen & Nono soon began to explore highly idiosyncratic paths in which electronics, politics and a utopian world music became the major themes. Even so, serialism of one kind or another remained the dominant aesthetic of the 1950s and 1960s - even the elderly Igor Stravinsky, so long the figurehead of the anti-Schoenberg forces, converted to the serial cause (and produced in works such as Movements and the Requiem Canticles, some of its most successful compositions). And though few of the erudite and abtruse works of the period have found much favour with the concert-going public, the serial ideal - with its belief that music is not only an art but a kind of science - has continued to influence work of many young composers, not least the alumni of Boulez's own musical research centre IRCAM, amoung them Kaija Saariaho & Magnus Lindberg.

[lisa needs braces]

Before the 20th century, only the upper classes could afford to listen to classical music. A classical musician had to strive to amuse and entertain. As high "art" classical music could then afford to function as both a signaling product and entertainment. The 20th century however brought along with it a rising middle class who could indeed afford to consume classical music, just like the upper classes. Thus the form lost a significant amount of its signaling value. Musical modernism -- and, really, modernism of any sort -- was a perfect solution to the problem of declining signaling value: the middle classes were turned of and disgusted and those who continued to consume the new art continued to use it as a signaling product (we can tolerate and enjoy what most people found loathsome! This means we have high openness and high intelligence.)

[CD]

I'm a huge supporter of Milton Babbitt and a fan of firebrand-era Boulez. This stuff is just sensory overload (in a good way). Abe's post is all kinds of wrong, obv.

[some guy]

Abe's post is not so much wrong, though it is that, too, as it is a hundred years out of date. The middle class started rising in the 19th century, not the twentieth, and were turned off by the moderns of the 19th century.

I'm sure that for some people music is a mark of prestige. But those of us who love it could care less if liking, say, Luc Ferrari means we're intelligent and open-minded. (I think that part of Abe's post is just backwards. People who are intelligent and open-minded tend to enjoy things beyond the standard fare.) We just simply like listening to Ferrari's sound world, that's all. Why isn't that good enough?

[greg]

Somewhere Boulez says the practice of serialism was torture to him, so much it prevented him from following his inclination.

Interesting... never knew that. Thanks for posting this.

I don't know what the future of music will bring us, assuming music does have a future. But I doubt the returns to the past suggested by the french neo-tonals as well as by the Part/Penderecki gang are any more interesting an option than rehashes of serialism, which is itself past. The best composers of our time, several of whom appear to be Finnish - derive neither from Pope Gregory nor from the quixotic Wuorinen, but from Lutoslawski and Messiaen and Dutilleux and the Boulez of Repons and of the orchestrated Notations. While Berg is a stronger influence on Wolfgang Rihm than Webern.

What I'd be interested in hearing is something I'm interested in pulling off myself- a contemporary composer with the mindset of a mid-late Romantic (Mahler/Wagner/Bruckner), but with touches of the 20th century. Maybe it's been "done" before, but not in the way I have in mind...

[not edward]

What I'd be interested in hearing is something I'm interested in pulling off myself- a contemporary composer with the mindset of a mid-late Romantic (Mahler/Wagner/Bruckner), but with touches of the 20th century. Maybe it's been "done" before, but not in the way I have in mind...

I think one of the many Wolfgang Rihms does this--I'm thinking of pieces like Two Other Movements and the Vers une symphonie fleuve series, or the 3rd and 5th quartets.

[greg]

I think one of the many Wolfgang Rihms does this--I'm thinking of pieces like Two Other Movements and the Vers une symphonie fleuve series, or the 3rd and 5th quartets.

Cool, I'll check these out.

[drogulus]

Very few people seem to realize Boulez and the others have long ago moved away from it: in fact, Boulez and Berio have become quite critical of it, Boulez ackonwledging integral serialism did not take sufficient account of how the music (however coherent it may look like on paper), would strike the living ear; while Berio appears to acknowledge but one masterpiece from those years (the Darmstadt era): Stockhausen's Kontrapunkte.

Somewhere Boulez says the practice of serialism was torture to him, so much it prevented him from following his inclination.

      I find this so preposterous as to be almost certainly massively dishonest. How do you frustrate the inclinations of music lovers, brag about how this is your intention and then expect people to believe that you have discovered that this is what you're doing and that it's torture to compose this way?

     This is the tragedy of the ideologue: How could I know that all those people would be killed? Look , maybe Boulez didn't work out all the implications of his hatred of huge classes of educated music lovers in order to make his radical cred shine brightly. In the end I don't give a shit. He's a liar or an idiot, take your pick.

[jochanaan]

...In the end I don't give a shit. He's a liar or an idiot, take your pick.

Many people who aren't liars or idiots get seduced by ideas less nobly conceived than Total Serialism.

[CD]

What I'd be interested in hearing is something I'm interested in pulling off myself- a contemporary composer with the mindset of a mid-late Romantic (Mahler/Wagner/Bruckner), but with touches of the 20th century. Maybe it's been "done" before, but not in the way I have in mind...

Nørgård, maybe.

[greg]

Nørgård, maybe.

Not really, though the 1st Symphony comes close. Also, I listened to (part of) 2 of those Rihm pieces, and they didn't quite sound like what I described...

[CD]

Not really, though the 1st Symphony comes close. Also, I listened to (part of) 2 of those Rihm pieces, and they didn't quite sound like what I described...

Describe exactly what you mean by composing a full-scale mockup of a 21st century Romantic symphony.

[jowcol]

They were all young with ambitions to change the world, and this was the spirit of that particular time ... all the arts were going thru a similar phases... they simply explored & experimented ... in this instance he tried serializing all compositional elements .. but in the end, they moved on quickly,grew tired of it, and learned from it what they did  ... it's just growth and being critical.

I guess I cut my teeth on the 60's school of Avante-Garde, and I found a lot of the serialist stuff from the 50s to sound (to my uneducated ears) rather contrived after a while. (There are some GREAT exceptions).  It was definitely a valid and important period for growth, but there was also some closed-mindedness to other approaches that came out of that stew... 

Like other periods and genres-- some great stuff, some souless knock-offs, some great innovations and dead ends.  Underhyped at times, overhyped at others. 

Just MHO-- your mileage may vary. 

[Scarpia]

What I'd be interested in hearing is something I'm interested in pulling off myself- a contemporary composer with the mindset of a mid-late Romantic (Mahler/Wagner/Bruckner), but with touches of the 20th century. Maybe it's been "done" before, but not in the way I have in mind...

Huh?  I don't find anything particularly distinguishing about this description, it would describe a fair fraction of music composed in the 20th century, roughly any 20th century composer who is not neoclassical.  Malcomb Arnold, Vaughan Williams, Walton, Benjamin Britten, Korngold, Zemlinsky, Finzi, Holmboe, Nielsen, Ives, Barber, Faure, any number of others.

[Luke]

Huh?  I don't find anything particularly distinguishing about this description, it would describe a fair fraction of music composed in the 20th century, roughly any 20th century composer who is not neoclassical.  Malcomb Arnold, Vaughan Williams, Walton, Benjamin Britten, Korngold, Zemlinsky, Finzi, Holmboe, Nielsen, Ives, Barber, Faure, any number of others.

The closest thing I can think of to Greg's description might be 1980s John Adams, perhaps. I'm thinking of Harmonielehre, for instance, which is explicitly saturated with Wagner, Mahler and Schoenberg. 'That' climax from Mahler 10 is essentially quoted - the notes are different, the reference is still clear - in the also-Wagner/Parsifal-inspired slow movement, 'The Amfortas Wound'; the whole piece, of course, is named after Schoenberg's harmony textbook. There are also those textures which seem so close to Sibelius in his landscape-painting mood (En Saga, Tapiola...). All of this in the context of what is essentially a big, romantically-chromatic, defiantly tonal symphony for large orchestra. Yes, certainly, the past looms large in this piece. But at the same time it is entirely of its own time...those seemingly Sibelian-figurations derive just as much from Terry Riley and Philip Glass and Adams own, earlier, more purely minimalist works, the triumphant power of the unadorned triad is also derived just as much from 1960s minimalism as from Mahler (where's Sean when you need him?), and the sophisticated, flawless orchestration is equally late 20th century, it seems to me. Harmonium is another Adams work of this time and in this vein; later on come Naive and Sentimental Music etc. etc. (there are quite a few, though in general the focus shifts away from European references to American ones, as in my favourite of these later pieces, The Dharma at Big Sur). Perhaps this is the sort of thing Greg is thinking of....

[lisa needs braces]

They were all young with ambitions to change the world, and this was the spirit of that particular time ... all the arts were going thru a similar phases... they simply explored & experimented ... in this instance he tried serializing all compositional elements .. but in the end, they moved on quickly,grew tired of it, and learned from it what they did  ... it's just growth and being critical.

They were going through similar phases because they had collectively lost any signaling value they may once have had for the upper classes. If it became easier for high culture to be consumed by the masses, then high culture had to be changed so that the teeming masses could be mostly repulsed and the upper classes could continue to use it as a signaling device, as a tool of status competition.

[greg]

Describe exactly what you mean by composing a full-scale mockup of a 21st century Romantic symphony.

Huh?  I don't find anything particularly distinguishing about this description, it would describe a fair fraction of music composed in the 20th century, roughly any 20th century composer who is not neoclassical.  Malcomb Arnold, Vaughan Williams, Walton, Benjamin Britten, Korngold, Zemlinsky, Finzi, Holmboe, Nielsen, Ives, Barber, Faure, any number of others.

It's kind of hard to describe in words, because it's mainly something that is felt. Not sure I could even elaborate on that.

[Scarpia]

They were going through similar phases because they had collectively lost any signaling value they may once have had for the upper classes. If it became easier for high culture to be consumed by the masses, then high culture had to be changed so that the teeming masses could be mostly repulsed and the upper classes could continue to use it as a signaling device, as a tool of status competition.

The reason it is so hard to refute this sort of drivel is because it's "not even wrong."  It is just a collection of anecdotal factoids which are claimed to support someone's pet theory without any attempt to be quantitative or specific about anything.  It is sub-standard even for internet discussion board blather. 

[CD]

Indeed — it's too easy to dismiss what you dislike aesthetically by making it "a class thing".

[some guy]

The struggle of class against class is a what struggle, a what struggle?