All set

Musical Times, Summer 2002 by Jones, Nicholas

All set NICHOLAS JONES Serial music, serial aesthetics: compositional theory in post-war Europe MJ Grant Cambridge UP (Cambridge 2002); 272pp; L45. ISBN 0 521 80458 2.

It seems almost inconceivable to imagine a time when the music of Stravinsky, Bartok and Hindemith, and composition in a broadly neoclassical style, was discussed at a Darmstadt summer school. But this was precisely the state of affairs in the early years after the Second World War. As history informs us, however, the situation was quick to change, for the year 1949 marked an emphatic return of the twelve-- note technique and the firm establishment in the early 1950s of Darmstadt as the headquarters of the new European serial movement. Serial music generally is regularly criticised for its cold, mathematical, cerebral complexity, but serial music written by the disciples of the `Darmstadt school' has arguably come in for the most sustained and often vitriolic offensives. The situation was hardly alleviated at the time with Pierre Boulez's notorious `Schonberg est mort' obituary, and his assertion that `every musician who has not felt - we do not say understood, but indeed felt - the necessity of the serial language is USELESS'. Such dogmatic, `Author-God' messages, enough to repel even the most sympathetic followers of the serial movement, have partly contributed to the rather negative reaction that such music has elicited from many quarters, most significantly perhaps from commentators of such repute as Adorno, Claude LeviStrauss and Nicolas Ruwet. More than fifty years after the first post-war serial pieces were being written, it seems that this situation has changed little.

Serial music, serial aesthetics, one of Cambridge University Press's most recent offerings in its `Music in the 20th Century' series, is therefore a very welcome and indeed important publication. The author's fundamental aim concerns what she describes as the `redefinition of serialism': `This book arose from the conviction that the role of theory in serial music of the so-called "Darmstadt school" has been misunderstood, and that this misunderstanding has adversely affected the reception of this music and its position in critical discourse' (p.1). She then goes on to suggest that this book might provide la more appropriate framework for the study of serial music. This necessitated a close reading of the writings of aerialists themselves, not to mention an understanding of the complex cultural climate which gave rise to them' (loc. cit.).

Grant is fully committed to this 'revisionist' approach and carries it out with verve and steadfast dedication. The opening two chapters are historically based and thus set the period under discussion (1945 to c.1960) squarely in context. The first chapter serves to introduce the reader to one of the book's central theses, that serial music and serial aesthetics should be understood within the wider context of post-war European culture, a context that embraces such intellectual movements as the `New Epoch' of quantum physics and information theory, Gestalt psychology, existentialism, and the theories of Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee. Later in the book this cultural pluralism is widened further to include architecture, abstract film, serialist art, concrete poetry and more specifically the information aesthetics and semiotics of Max Bense and Umberto Eco. The unravelling of these very complex strands, and relating them specifically to musical serialism, is one of the major strengths of the book. Indeed, Grant propounds this thesis with some vigour, often constructing a convincing argument in defence of her proposition. But whilst this proposition is a useful and indeed necessary way of viewing and therefore understanding - the serial project, I suspect that one should not lose sight of the fact that when this cultural 'scaffolding' is dismantled, the works themselves must stand as pieces of music, ultimately without reference to this wider purview.

The second chapter discusses the early developments of serialism, especially the central role taken by Herbert Eimert, and the rise of electronic music. For Grant, serialism cannot be understood properly without taking into account its relationship to electronic music: `the one not only had a decisive impact upon the other, but electronic music encapsulates many of the important aspects of serialism' (p.50). This latter point is briefly explored in this chapter but warrants a more developed discussion in the proceeding chapter in direct relation to the first volume of the journal die Reihe: Information uber serielle Musik, which was dedicated entirely to electronic music.

An essential component of Grant's book is a consistent focus on the eight volumes of die Reihe, which appeared in German from 1955 to 1962 (the American edition, which in Grant's opinion is poorly translated (hence in the book she has worked almost entirely with the German edition, and has translated all quotes anew), was published between 1958 and 1968). Edited by Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen, the journal's eight volumes contain a number of very interesting and highly revealing articles written by the leading protagonists of the European serial movement, including Boulez, Henri Pousseur, Dieter Schnebel, GM Koenig, and the editors themselves. A large proportion of these articles are commentaries from composers on their own works as well as on their own theoretical speculations, of which Stockhausen's fascinating discussions on the nature of musical time is just one of many examples. But the second volume of die Reihe is involved exclusively with Anton Webern, whose music is generally accepted as being a crucial cog in the development of serial thinking.