IX. Twelve-Tone Music
History and Context of Serialism
Mark Gotham
Key Takeaways
- where it came from: not only Schoenberg, but also Hauer and others
- what it’s “really” about: a new world order, and if so an equalizing or totalizing one?
- tonal precedents in Bach and Haydn, and “tonal tone rows” in (for example) Alban Berg, Hale Smith, and Benjamin Britten
- “total” or “integral” serialism in (for example) Ruth Crawford Seeger, Milton Babbitt, Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez.
Why Serialism? What’s the Attraction?
Some grand narratives of 20th-century music cast atonality as a logical consequence of a historical trend toward ever more chromaticism, and serialism as a matter of creating a radically different kind of structure out of the total chromatic. It would appear to achieve that end, at least for composers who joined Schoenberg in viewing it as a “method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another” (1950, 107)—contrast that with the fundamentally hierarchical tonal system. It may not be coincidental that it emerged in interwar Europe, when there may well have been a desire to start anew.
Equal tones? A new world order? Maybe, but the method has served a wide range of composers with correspondingly diverse aims, so it’s not so straightforward to summarize. There’s also a totalizing angle here that’s rather less utopian. Schoenberg is famously alleged to have described “his” discovery as one “which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years” (qtd. in Stuckenschmidt 1977, 277). Schoenberg may or may not have actually said this, but Boulez definitely did later describe every composer to have remained “outside the serial experiments” since their discovery as “useless” (“Schönberg est mort,” Score, 1952, reproduced in Notes of an Apprenticeship, 1968, 274).
A Series of Precedents?
There is a great deal of precedent for general forms of musical thinking pertinent to serial technique, from simple melodic inversion to furiously complex crab canons, and certain works like Bach’s Art of Fugue are notable partly for the strictness and comprehensiveness of design in general, and the healthy dose of “mirror writing” in particular.
In these cases, the mirror is usually “horizontal,” giving versions of the twelve-tone technique’s I-form. The R-form of retrograde symmetry (given by a “vertical” mirror, if you will) is a primarily 20th-century concern, serial and otherwise. Non-serial 20th-century examples include a great deal of Bartók, the prelude/postlude pair in Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis, and Britten’s Cantata Academica mvt. 2 (tellingly titled Alla rovescio). There are earlier examples, such as the Menuet al Roverso from Haydn’s Symphony no. 47 in G, but they are very rare.
There are (equally rare and also rather dubious) cases of tonal works that are said to exhibit the specifically twelve-tone practice of rotating through all the pitches. Often-cited examples include the choi