# Is "12-tone serial music" a genre?



## NickNotabene (Jun 13, 2013)

It has now been almost 90 years since Schoenberg gathered about twenty pupils together "to explain to them the new method." And it's now been 75 years since he felt the need to respond to Richard S. Hill's article, "Schoenberg's Tone-Rows and the Tonal Systems of the Future." And as demonstrated by more recent public comments from so many in influential positions to shape or confirm crowd opinions about music, not much has changed. The great misunderstanding that Schoenberg feared is alive and thriving.

The trendy definitions of 12-tone serialism currently in circulation – ranging variously from the nearly helpful to the not quite truthy to the completely bolloxed – do have at least one thing in common: they pose as quasi-technical descriptions of a compositional practice that supposedly any lay reader can understand. But what is most curious, and rarely remarked upon, is that many of those who define this compositional tool in this quasi-technical way then proceed immediately to use that terminology, not in any further technical sense, but in a critical sense – one that invites the grouping and evaluation of a congeries of dissimilar musical works written by a diversity of composers over the past 90 years, bound together only by their purported twelve-toniness.

This is a sleight of hand that resembles the trick Hume complained about in is-becomes-ought arguments. In slipping unnoticed from a value-free technical mode into a value-laden critical mode, "12-tone technique" is turned into what we have come to call a "musical genre." Below the radar, the various layreader-friendly quasi-technical definitions are taken as identifying the salient characteristics defining a genre - a style called "12-tone music." Never mind that this category mistake results in throwing together willy-nilly many works that are stylistically diverse in the extreme. Once genre conversion is successful – once it is accepted that all 12-tone-serial-technique based musics have an identifiable characteristic in common that no ear would recognize were it not for the brain's insistence – it then becomes possible to ask seriously absurd questions such as, "Do you like 12-tone music?"

Given the confusion of technique and genre that has grown up around this idea, it is not surprising that the layperson (worst case: the unsuspecting, trusting young music student) is left with an understanding of 12-tone serialism that's about as accurate as "evolution theory" defined by Trofim Lysenko – and, I think, just as socio-politically motivated.


----------



## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

It is just another way to write, no need for anyone to be so Dogmatic about just another way to write.

Ditto on the whole tonality vs. atonality thingy. A few Dogmatists are still arguing about that, like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, sort of, while both composers and more and more of the public have simply moved on, considering what they hear of far greater importance than some academic paper.

[[ I'd love to call this now, as in "game over / thread done." but am not so naive as to always expect that which I wish. Anyhoo, more important things to really wish for  ]]


----------



## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Opponents and proponents both seem to lump together approaches to the 12-tone method that are as unrelated as Romanticism and Classicism in their aims and means.

One can take the row as a single unit by itself, a subject, as Webern or Stravinsky did.
One can break the row into small motifs that form subjects, as Schoenberg did.
Or, one can use the row as a basic material to be supplemented as necessary by anything you wish, as Berg did. (Lulu has a separate tone row associated with each major character.)

Aaron Copland's brief forays into 12-tone writing are another thing altogether, barely adhering to the idea of the row as a single unit at all.

But what does the public care? They know what they like and they know without listening to or understanding any of this music that it's "mechanical", "unlistenable", "academic" and so forth. Never mind that not only can they not distinguish between the above, they cannot distinguish between any of them and "free chromaticism/atonality" with much, if any accuracy, and lump them together with heavily chromatic tonal music.


----------



## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

I wholly agree with the OP. Although, "just as socio-politically motivated."... may be in some cases. But, I think, in many cases it's just because of plain ignorance, dogmatism, and that necessity some people have of simplifying things so that their little brains can handle them without too much thinking.


----------



## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Mahlerian said:


> Opponents and proponents both seem to lump together approaches to the 12-tone method that are as unrelated as Romanticism and Classicism in their aims and means.
> 
> One can take the row as a single unit by itself, a subject, as Webern or Stravinsky did.
> One can break the row into small motifs that form subjects, as Schoenberg did.
> ...


This post is very interesting, because it separates three completely different things that often are mixed in these kind of discussions: How opponents seem to lump together approaches to the 12-tone method that are as unrelated as Romanticism and Classicism in their aims and means; How proponents seem to lump together approaches to the 12-tone method that are as unrelated as Romanticism and Classicism in their aims and means; and, how the general public often cannot distinguish between any of them and "free chromaticism/atonality" with much, if any accuracy, and lump them together with heavily chromatic tonal music.
All this adds to a tremendous confusion that some people often exploit in a dishonest way in order to get some water for their own mills.


----------



## drpraetorus (Aug 9, 2012)

it is a musical evolutionary dead end


----------



## Guest (Jun 15, 2013)

NickNotabene said:


> The trendy definitions of 12-tone serialism currently in circulation - ranging variously from the nearly helpful to the not quite truthy to the completely bolloxed


Beauty!



NickNotabene said:


> the grouping and evaluation of a congeries of dissimilar musical works written by a diversity of composers over the past 90 years, bound together only by their purported twelve-toniness.


Yeah. Lumpism. Any of various lumpings that treat dissimilar things as all the same: sexism, racism, age-ism, species-ism....



NickNotabene said:


> seriously absurd questions such as, "Do you like 12-tone music?"


I recall asking once if anyone liked ever single tonal piece that had ever been written. If they could distinguish Bach from Bax. That challenge didn't get any traction at all, hahaha!


----------



## NickNotabene (Jun 13, 2013)

PetrB said:


> It is just another way to write, no need for anyone to be so Dogmatic about just another way to write.
> 
> Ditto on the whole tonality vs. atonality thingy. A few Dogmatists are still arguing about that, like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, sort of, while both composers and more and more of the public have simply moved on, considering what they hear of far greater importance than some academic paper.
> 
> [[ I'd love to call this now, as in "game over / thread done." but am not so naive as to always expect that which I wish. Anyhoo, more important things to really wish for  ]]


Then "why bother to comment?" The real insufferable snob in the room is the one who enters a discussion with the sole purpose of demonstrating the purposelessness of the discussion.

Arnold Schoenberg:


> Indeed, since musicians have acquired culture and think they have to demonstrate this by avoiding shop-talk, there are scarcely any musicians with whom one can talk about music.


Me:


> What do these people think? That the notes just fall from the sky?


----------



## NickNotabene (Jun 13, 2013)

drpraetorus said:


> it is a musical evolutionary dead end


Perhaps. But here's another way to look at it. The serial DNA is now in the music gene pool quietly doing its work. We have no idea yet whether it will lead to disease or a dead end or show up in surprising ways that will reinvigorate future musics. Evidently you have faith in (hope for?) the former outcome. I happen to have faith in (hope for!) the latter outcome. Whatever the ultimate influence or lack of influence, it happened, and many composers are still using it (whether those all admit it or not), and there's nothing we can do but observe.


----------



## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

NickNotabene said:


> Then "why bother to comment?" The real insufferable snob in the room is the one who enters a discussion with the sole purpose of demonstrating the purposelessness of the discussion.
> 
> Arnold Schoenberg:
> 
> Me:


Beg pardon, but the flap over it, all quite nicely listed by you, has me over-reactive. I always counter with "Mozart wrote in the same scale and system of harmonic function as his peers." (indeed, as many a pop musician does,) then ask -- "Does that all sound the same to you?"

Point is a scale, way of writing, way(s) of pitch organization are all only as good -- or interesting -- as the composer whose hands are holding the pen which writes it. Terrible pedantic works exist in tonal music, atonal serial music, atonal non-serial music, as well as brilliant, gorgeous and highly expressive works using the same scales, organization principles, etc.

Ergo: It is just one more way to write -- and I should have clarified that vs. just dropping it in 

P.s. The proof, to me, that it is not a genre is in the huge variety of works -- and how those sound, one compared to the next, one composer's work to the next -- which are in that particular use of technique: the closest I could get to calling it a 'genre' as per dodecaphonic music would be by period, i.e. it is either modern or contemporary classical.


----------



## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

NickNotabene said:


> Perhaps. But here's another way to look at it. The serial DNA is now in the music gene pool quietly doing its work. We have no idea yet whether it will lead to disease or a dead end or show up in surprising ways that will reinvigorate future musics. Evidently you have faith in (hope for?) the former outcome. I happen to have faith in (hope for!) the latter outcome. Whatever the ultimate influence or lack of influence, it happened, and many composers are still using it (whether those all admit it or not), and there's nothing we can do but observe.


I think that serial music, particularly the serialization of harmony has made a huge impact (a positive impact, to my view).
As you say, "the serial DNA is now in the music gene pool quietly doing its work.". Check this video:





 (Ligeti's piano etude 'Automne à Varsovie', at 4:18)

The harmony does not follow a strict serial procedure at all (i.e., there are no rows, etc.). Clearly, it's very chromatic. But, not in a naive way, watch the video carefully. In certain passages, when some note in the chromatic scale is not played, sooner or later the note in question is actually played, so that all the notes of the chormatic scale have sounded in a short interval of time (for example, at 6:47 a chromatic progression starts in the right hand, note how at 6:50 the thumb avoids that C but almost immediately, the C is played by the thumb of the left hand). It's not serial, but it's serial in a "statistical" sense, at least in this basic property. Of course serialism is much more than that... But anyway, it's an interesting example, I think.


----------



## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

NickNotabene said:


> Perhaps. But here's another way to look at it. The serial DNA is now in the music gene pool quietly doing its work. We have no idea yet whether it will lead to disease or a dead end or show up in surprising ways that will reinvigorate future musics. Evidently you have faith in (hope for?) the former outcome. I happen to have faith in (hope for!) the latter outcome. Whatever the ultimate influence or lack of influence, it happened, and many composers are still using it (whether those all admit it or not), and there's nothing we can do but observe.


Everyone knows Musica Ficta was the beginning of the end....


----------



## NickNotabene (Jun 13, 2013)

PetrB said:


> Beg pardon, but the flap over it, all quite nicely listed by you, has me over-reactive. I always counter with "Mozart wrote in the same scale and system of harmonic function as his peers." (indeed, as many a pop musician does,) then ask -- "Does that all sound the same to you?"
> 
> Point is a scale, way of writing, way(s) of pitch organization are all only as good -- or interesting -- as the composer whose hands are holding the pen which writes it. Terrible pedantic works exist in tonal music, atonal serial music, atonal non-serial music, as well as brilliant, gorgeous and highly expressive works using the same scales, organization principles, etc.
> 
> ...


Can't argue with this even one little bit.


----------



## NickNotabene (Jun 13, 2013)

aleazk said:


> I think that serial music, particularly the serialization of harmony has made a huge impact (a positive impact, to my view).
> As you say, "the serial DNA is now in the music gene pool quietly doing its work.". Check this video:
> 
> 
> ...


"Chromatic completion" has been around for years - well back into the common practice period. E.g., Beethoven did it. You can look at it from two standpoints. One, as a genuine form-inducing technique (you have to plot modulations to get at all 12 tones), or two, as a kind of challenging secret game composers played among themselves. Or three: as both. But whatever, IMO it's certainly a mostly unacknowledged forerunner of 12t serialism &, as your example shows, continues without the need to justify its use as a serial technique. Thanks for the example!


----------



## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

NickNotabene said:


> "Chromatic completion" has been around for years - well back into the common practice period. E.g., Beethoven did it. You can look at it from two standpoints. One, as a genuine form-inducing technique (you have to plot modulations to get at all 12 tones), or two, as a kind of challenging secret game composers played among themselves. Or three: as both. But whatever, IMO it's certainly a mostly unacknowledged forerunner of 12t serialism &, as your example shows, continues without the need to justify its use as a serial technique. Thanks for the example!


Yes, "Chromatic completion" has been around for years, as you say. But, I think, this example is much more than that. Maybe that excerpt I mentioned was somewhat dull and does not make justice to the piece. In the 50's, Ligeti was in Cologne with Boulez, Stockhausen, et all. For a while, he considered the option of being a serialist. But, at the end, he rejected the idea (of becoming a serialist, but he not rejected serialism!). Anyway, serialism heavily influenced his way of thinking about harmony. His approach is very chromatic (one cannot say it's "tonal", since there are not functional dispositives or elements at all). It's not serial, since he don't use tone rows. But he uses this idea of Chromatic completion to the extreme (that's why he sometimes used that term "statistical" serialization, in the sense that it's not a precise serialization, but in the overall structure, all the twelve notes are aproximately treated in equal footing). So, for me, we can actually say that definitely serialism influenced his style. I see in that way, at least.


----------



## EddieRUKiddingVarese (Jan 8, 2013)

NickNotabene said:


> It has now been almost 90 years since Schoenberg gathered about twenty pupils together "to explain to them the new method." And it's now been 75 years since he felt the need to respond to Richard S. Hill's article, "Schoenberg's Tone-Rows and the Tonal Systems of the Future." And as demonstrated by more recent public comments from so many in influential positions to shape or confirm crowd opinions about music, not much has changed. The great misunderstanding that Schoenberg feared is alive and thriving.
> 
> The trendy definitions of 12-tone serialism currently in circulation - ranging variously from the nearly helpful to the not quite truthy to the completely bolloxed - do have at least one thing in common: they pose as quasi-technical descriptions of a compositional practice that supposedly any lay reader can understand. But what is most curious, and rarely remarked upon, is that many of those who define this compositional tool in this quasi-technical way then proceed immediately to use that terminology, not in any further technical sense, but in a critical sense - one that invites the grouping and evaluation of a congeries of dissimilar musical works written by a diversity of composers over the past 90 years, bound together only by their purported twelve-toniness.
> 
> ...


Like your discussion on 12 tone serial music but got confused when you mentioned Trofim Lysenko........
Never heard of him but reading up I see "He is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular"- maybe he was working for the US 
but I guess you were referring to his Environmentally Acquired Inheritance Theories ?? as it might relate to evolution theory................ 
Agreed 12-tone serialism is not a genre but a method of creating/ writing music but it does impose some stylistic characteristics.


----------



## Guest (Jun 16, 2013)

But couldn't you say that practically anything can impose stylistic characteristics? Tonality, serialism, concerto, string quartet, opera, baroque, impressionism.

But it doesn't seem to have stopped there being an almost unlimited variety in all those areas.


----------



## Arsakes (Feb 20, 2012)

Yes. what else it is?

NO! IT'S THE PURPOSE OF THE ARTISTIC EVOLUTION. THOSE WHO CANNOT ADAPT IT WILL BE VANISHED FROM THE FACE OF THE HISTORY!

I think it's OK for Other genres to use other than 8-tone system sometimes (and in small portions) but not for the classic music.


----------



## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

Arsakes said:


> I think it's OK for Other genres to use other than 8-tone system sometimes (and in small portions) but not for the classic music.


Why do you think that?


----------



## NickNotabene (Jun 13, 2013)

EddieRUKiddingVarese said:


> Agreed 12-tone serialism is not a genre but a method of creating/ writing music but it does impose some stylistic characteristics.


Absolutely. As does any tonalism such as diatonicism.


----------



## Arsakes (Feb 20, 2012)

Crudblud said:


> Why do you think that?


I think nothing except 8-tonal system fits the classical instruments. Anything except 8-tonal results in being ugly/unpleasant.

In other/newer instruments it may work better. I don't know much about this. I like the stretching between two notes, like in Steel Guitar.


----------



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

EddieRUKiddingVarese said:


> ...but I guess you were referring to his Environmentally Acquired Inheritance Theories ?? as it might relate to evolution theory................


Not to digress, but Lamarck and Lysenko might be making a comeback. It seems that acquired characteristics *can* be inherited! See epigenetics: "In biology, and specifically genetics, epigenetics is the study of changes in gene expression or cellular phenotype, caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence."


----------



## Arsakes (Feb 20, 2012)

^ Nuclear Mutation? Or maybe "the forces" of the universe.


----------



## GGluek (Dec 11, 2011)

Just a quick quibble about terminology. "12-tone" does not equal "serialism." Serialism is a later technique that tried to extend 12-note organizing principles into things like time values, rhythm, etc. They are not the same. Serial music is 12-note, but 12-note music is not necessarily serial.

cheers-


----------



## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Arsakes said:


> I think nothing except 8-tonal system fits the classical instruments. Anything except 8-tonal results in being ugly/unpleasant.


I know! That pentatonic music makes me run screaming every time.


----------



## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

GGluek said:


> Just a quick quibble about terminology. "12-tone" does not equal "serialism." Serialism is a later technique that tried to extend 12-note organizing principles into things like time values, rhythm, etc. They are not the same. Serial music is 12-note, but 12-note music is not necessarily serial.
> 
> cheers-


The term "serialism" is applied when a musical aspect or variable is treated in a "serial" way, i.e, using ordered rows (it can be notes, indications about dynamics , etc.). The term "integral serialism" is used when all the musical aspects or variables are treated in a serial way (e.g., Boulez's Structures I).
Usually, the term "serialism" can be used for an indication of the serialization of some musical variable. So, often one simply says that 12-note music is serial... But, of course, it's not necessarily integral serialism.


----------

