In his book Twelve-Tone Music in America, Joseph Straus cites a number of potentially damning studies that suggest the average listener is in fact unable to perceive the row and its transformations in the abstract (as presented in the examples above) or in musical context. He responds to these studies by arguing that 1) they are testing the wrong things; and 2) they are testing the wrong people. Many theorists and composers of serial music would say that the row itself operates as a background structuring principle: its job is to organize surface- and subsurface-level motives that are perceptible to most listeners. Second, many people listen avidly to tonal music; in contrast, few people listen regularly to atonal music (generally speaking) and fewer still have studied its methods of organization. Even a short tutorial in the processes that these composers employ goes a long way toward increasing the music’s palatability.[1]
In some sense, serial music is about forgetting, or perhaps more accurately, about trying to remember. The series rarely appears in an immediately perceptible form, and any repetition that may used to establish memory is avoided at nearly every level in the composition. This inability to remember is one of the reasons this music is often deemed inaccessible.
Straus also posits the “myth of inexpressiveness,” in which he relates claims that, “serial music is inexpressive, uncommunicative, and ultimately meaningless,” its expressive gestures are “inappropriately borrowed from earlier music. It lacks human feeling and operates, at best, within an extremely narrow expressive range, usually having to do with pain and anguish, horror and alienation.” Rochberg is, in fact, the first writer that Straus cites as perpetuating this myth: in his essay on the third string quartet, Rochberg associates the twelve-tone system with limited musical—and thus, emotional—expressivity.[2] It seems to me that, in Rochberg’s case, the emotions that Straus associates with serial music are precisely those that Rochberg would be experiencing this wake of his tragedy, but we know that this is practically the opposite of what actually transpired. Straus offers a quotation from American composer Ross Lee Finney in an effort to debunk the myth: “I had some emotional experiences during the war, the sort of thing where you would say, ‘Well I just haven’t got the words to explain or describe this.’ I had the feeling that I didn’t’ have the music to reflect this […] My movement into twelve-tone technique was because of that feeling of inadequate expressive potential from the triadic technique.”[3] Rochberg, in fact, expressed a similar sentiment: “One of the most powerful impulses toward serialism, twelve-tone, whatever you want to call it, was my reaction to my [World War II] experience.”[4] Twelve-tone music is capable of a wide variety of expression, and is capable of expressing positive as well as negative emotions.
Serial music has been accused of many things: it has been called unnatural, it has been associated with left-wing politics, it has been accused of scaring away audiences for contemporary art music, and it has been implicated in a wide variety of other musical-social ills. As Straus points out, people from different cultures engage in all kinds of behaviors that might be considered unnatural or taboo by members of another culture; this does not make these behaviors inherently bad or wrong, nor does not give anyone the right to condemn them.[5] What is important is that these myths exist and persist even after nearly a century. Not only does the public tend to buy into these myths, but, as Straus shows, many composers (serial composers, at that!) and other professional musicians do as well. These myths have shaped—and continue to shape—the composition and reception of serial music.
Contrast the mythical inscrutability of serialism with Barber’s aesthetic: “my aim is to write good music that will be comprehensible to as many people as possible, instead of music heard only by small, snobbish musical societies in the large cities. Radio makes this aim entirely possible of achievement.”[6] Barber’s Adagio was one of the first compositions in America to have its premiere on the radio. Barber’s longtime partner, Gian Carlo Menotti, also tried to reach as many people as possible with his music. Predominantly an opera composer, Menotti wrote several works specifically for radio and television broadcast. That both composers’ styles were considered “backward-looking” is also telling; people tend to favor the familiar in their listening habits.
Despite composing with serial methods himself, Rochberg was critical of the works of many of his fellow serialists. Around the time he was working on his second string quartet (a serial work with soprano soloist that invites comparison with Schoenberg’s second quartet) he writes to composer and friend Istvan Anhalt, “I remain thoroughly & totally unconvinced of both the synthesizer (as Babbitt employs it) and of Babbitt as a composer.” Babbitt’s music, along with the music of Elliott Carter and Leon Kirchner, is simply “external façade,” which Rochberg argues needs to be stripped away in order to get at the spiritual essence of music.[7] He opposes the atonal techniques associated with modernism in his article “Can the Arts Survive Modernity?”: no matter how organized an atonal composition is, the science and logic employed in its creation is often lost to the listener’s perception.[8] He blames this demise on the emergence of atonality, and continues by stating:
At best, such music [atonal] can be only an ordered (or not) collection of events, sound sensations which have no memorable relationships to what has come before or what will follow--although its composer could, probably, demonstrate by analysis of one kind or another that the relationships do, in fact, exist on the page. But what if they do not and cannot exist in the ear? … no amount of intellectual explanation or rationalization can make the ear do what it does best: remember.13
He argues that techniques that produce unity in music, such as form and motive, rely on the capacity of people to remember; according to Rochberg, the organic nature of a piece of music depends upon its past, however immediate that past may be.10 Rochberg notes that these techniques have their roots in psychology and thus transcend musical historical periods. Even twelve-tone music can be written in a way that privileges these unifying musical features.
[1] Straus, 214-218.
[2] Straus, 221.
[3] Finney, cited in Straus 222.
[4] Robert Duffalo, Trackings: Composers Speak with Robert Duffalo. Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1989. 63.
[5] The second part of Straus 2009 explicates these and other myths in detail.
[6] Quoted in Larson (2010), 52.
[7] EM 5-6
[8] I would argue that “the science and logic of its creation” should be lost to the listener’s perception. The row and matrix are simply means to an end, not ends themselves. Rochberg seems to be buying into several of Straus’s myths; namely, that serial works are controlled by mathematical processes and that the row and its resultant structures are imperceptible to all but the most skilled listeners.