Friday, March 18, 2005
the cult of 12-tone music...
In Kyle Gann's excellent blog, he poses a question in the form of a statement: "Perhaps it’s time to admit that, not only is 12-tone music stone dead, it was never much more than a fringe cult in the first place?" You can read the whole entry here.
Interestingly, he points out that the recent performance of Webern's seminal Symphonie, op. 21 was only the third performance in NYC, the city I had thought was a hotbed of new music. Gann's question relates to the possibility that outside of academic centers, perhaps dodecaphonic music just was never much of anything, amounting to a cult that is now dead.
I have to admit, at one time I was part of that cult. I moved up from Bartok through Lutoslawski and into the Second Viennese School, pouring through scores and records of Berg, Schoenberg and Webern with a lot of interest. I started writing 12-tone music, only abandoning it while in college in the early 80's when I felt I had done all with the technique that I really could. I just posted the score of my last 12-tone work, a long piano piece called Ineffabilities from 1980-1981, on my Web site and as much as I like it, I still notice how much I was straining to make the technique conform to what I wanted it to do. Parts of the piece are not serial; I just gave up and started tinkering with an early form of what was to become my later "minimal" works. Yet at the same time, I really really still like the piece overall. I took it as a challenge to be able to express what I wanted to using the 12-tone technique, and assume Arnold, Alban and Anton tried to do the same (I never noticed before this alliteration in their first names...). I was a very big believer in the "supremacy" of 12-tone music for a long time, reading polemics like Rene Leibowitz' "Schoenberg and His School" (which does everything it can to try to prove that 12-tone music is a logical progression) and trying to get my one composition teacher to at least be comfortable with my musical choices. Eventually, I realized that any technique is just a means to an end, and technique signifies little if there is nothing else behind the music.
Many audiences HATE 12-tone music, and I think that's partly because of its dissonance and complexity, as well as some of the 12-tone composers who came after the Second Vienna School. Serializing everything (going beyond even what Messiaen dabbled with in "Mode de valeurs et d'intensitis") can easily lead to music that is rigid and expressionless. That Messiaen didn't create something ugly is to his credit (I really like the piece), but he was also wise to not pursue this approach with the rest of his music. Dissonance doesn't have to be ugly, nor should all music be pleasant and popular. There's a lot of beauty in Webern's music, and there's a lot of banality in more "pleasant" music written in the past decade. In the end, it gets back to "meaning" and "expression." If the piece has something to say and the composer is honestly expressing him or herself, it will resonate with someone. I suspect that's what goes on with Webern, Feldman and other infrequently-performed composers (at least, they're infrequently performed in the US. Feldman is performed quite a bit in Europe, and SHOULD be performed much more often in the US).
So is it a cult? In some ways, I suppose so, in others no. If that's the case, then several of us on the Why Patterns mailing list are a bunch of Feldman cultists...
posted by David Toub
9:15 AM
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