Schoenberg's star ascended when the postwar Darmstadt musical leaders took up
serialism as their god, and it has largely stayed there since due to their advocacy.
It will also be seen that a compositional method such as '
serialism' in the sense of the most recent developments is not just one method out of many, but one that has its particular roots in a new spiritual outlook...." [7] The insertion of this sort of remark in a tribute dating from precisely the years when Stravinsky himself is coming to incorporate
serialism into his spiritual conduct, is not accidental.
Hennenberg's book is particularly relevant for those interested in post-1945
serialism and polystylism, especially their European manifestations.
Everyone knew--the history books all agreed--that he had reestablished twelve-tone music on a firmer, broader, and richer base, his Three Compositions for Piano (1947) anticipating by half a decade the integral
serialism of Pierre Boulez.
It's a terrific work (the first of his excursions into
serialism, although it hardly sounds so) firmly in the Bartok-Prokofiev mould and full of explosive energy.
But Luke Howard's even more recent contention that the "emphasis given to serial and electronic elements in Stockhausen's Gesang der Jiinglinge often overshadows the explicitly religious content of the work"[9] falls down flat, in face of the simple fact that, apart from Richard Toop's discussion of its 7 x 7 number-square,[10] no consideration of
serialism in this piece has ever appeared in print until now.
Simms, and an elucidation, by Martha Hyde, of how set theory is related to, and distinct from, Schoebergian
serialism. I feel that Simms, with his cool style and lofty tone, breaks off too soon; after the best theoretical expose I have seen of this topic, there is a brief flurry of analysis of Webern's song 'So ich traurig bin', Op.
When he did find words to discuss this, one of the first prototypes of multiple
serialism, European style, they were far from complimentary.
Structurally ("intra-textually") she describes the Movements as an important step in the development of
serialism in the US (based as they are on Stravinsky's use of hexachordal, rotational patterns within the series), while they were commissioned with the help of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a body dedicated to the propagation of Western, liberal ideas in the early years of the Cold War.
Like many of us making music in the early 1970s, Arthur and I felt that "art" music had become something that only other composers could appreciate, and we were therefore interested in moving away from
serialism and toward tonality.
2 uses
serialism in a free and personal way, alongside snippets of Mozart and bird song in the opening Andantino, and shapes the Lento second movement around a Mahleriansounding evocation of Blake's 'Sleep, sleep!
Indeed, although the partitional categorization of the totality of trichords into twelve trichordal types has its origins - analytically, synthetically, and historically - in the twelve-tone universe, since the criteria for trichordal inclusion in one of the equivalence classes defining a "type" are equivalences of the intervallic content of the associated combinatorial hexachords (or, identically, pitch-class equivalence to within any combination of the usual transformations), these types have come to play decisive roles in music which would and could disavow any taint of twelve-tone
serialism, perhaps because of the dependence of the classification solely upon content, not at all upon order.
The importance of
serialism in Weinzweig's composing, teaching and reputation is a well known thread weaved through several chapters, as is his pioneering spirit (both in composing and organizing), his tireless lobbying on behalf of Canadian composers, and his sarcastic humor (although his nickname for Toronto Symphony Orchestra conductor Sir Ernest MacMillan--"Lord Largo"--was a new one on me).
RILM describes Liber Amicorum as "[r]eflecting the currents of history from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century--the advent of ethnomusicology, the rise and fall of Nazism, and the heyday of
serialism ..." It is the second publication in a two-part series, the first being RILM's Speaking ofMusic: Music Conferences, 1835-1966 (reviewed Fontes Artis Musicae, Jan-March 2005, v.52, no.1.) Complementing Speaking of Music, Liber Amicorum continues to bring together heretofore-scattered scholarly essays.
(Einstein on the Beach?) Its systems often feel as detached to me as the academic
serialism they were originally intended to contrast.
