Well, all writing on music is subjective to some degree.
Henck's is subjective to the minimum degree.
Well, passages like 'The explanation of this factor [the 'greatest order in disorder'] from the compositional-technical aspect has already been introduced with the statement on the "absence of contradiction in the ordering of the particulars and the whole." This seems to the author to have an essentially religious background,obviously containing the idea of a harmony, an organic affinity of the particles to the steallar, the idea of one in all and all in one' seems pretty subjective to me!
But the choice of which aspects to focus on itself reflects deeply subjective priorities as well.
If you hadn't split up my quote, then we'd be in agreement.. do you see that?.
I'm not quite sure, to be honest.
The row is a bunch of notes, maybe a 'matrix', but the composer is needed (a composing subject) to turn it into a set of small-scale intervallic densities and melodic/contoural thingies...
No, the intervals and intervallic densities and other factors are already a property of a row - those come from its ordering (do we agree that there is at least some degree of equivalence between different form of a row differentiated only by transposition? If so, then it is the relationships between the pitches that really count more than the specific pitches found at a particular transposition).
an inept composer would bury these properties and just make noise.
That's a question of what the composer does with it, not whether those properties are there from the outset.
And I also agree that KS-criticism lacks this element of small-to-large-scale analysis.
That is a slightly different thing from that to which I am referring. I'm interested in what makes the end results meaningful, in the sense of seeming not entirely arbitrary, why some might produce certain types of responses, albeit within a certain generally very small community of listeners, more so than other possible end results, and also why the broader category of experiences generated by serial techniques have an alienating effect on a lot of listeners. These things might equally be the product of both small- and large-scale aspects of the music.
I am not an unvarnished advocate of serialism
In light of all else I've said in this thread, you might be surprised to hear that, all things told, I still think it is in many ways the most important development of the post-1945 era (meaning the types of serialism that such an era bequeathed).
-- we still haven't fully understood its possibilities as a contribution to the understanding of 'how music works' or 'what music can do', other than that one can think of music in terms of its individual parameters. Everyone who thinks about and makes music nees to take the very idea of parameter-oriented music (such a new concept!)
In terms of terminology it is new but some aspects can be seen to be prefigured in earlier times. Beethoven would articulate a theme differently upon various reasons, thus producing some degree of 'articulative autonomy' (which can arguably be found in some baroque music as well); some of the articulations of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, let alone Schumann, Liszt and Brahms, have a defamiliarising aspect upon the material in terms of pitch and rhythm (much though Schenker would have liked these to be ironed out, as is clear from his book on performance), which anticipate, say, the work of Kagel (whose disjunction between parameters demonstrates his clear debt to possibilities bequeathed by serialism). The relationship between parameters in earlier eras was not necessarily so 'organic' as it is often believed to be (I'm not saying you are saying that, but this is worth pointing out in this context).
I'm not entirely sure that serialism so much entails a contribution to the
understanding of 'how music works'/'what music can do' (that would be to locate its significance mostly in the realms of analysis and interpretation), but rather more simply it adds to the possibilities of both such things! It enables them to be composed.
and think about its possibilities when confronted with a consciousness (human) that is reared to recognize Gestalten (composite sense units) rather than individual sounds.
(I'm not looking to pick fights here, just exploring the implications of your comments). I wonder how much music that might broadly be called 'serial' (in the sense of using serial techniques to a large degree) is really like that, though? Aren't there just a small handful of pieces (odd ones by Boulez, Goeyvaerts, Stockhausen, Babbitt, Clementi, Amy) that really do isolate individual sounds rather than allowing them to some extent to coalesce into larger units (or to generate musical meaning through other more macroscopic aspects such as, for example, broader processes involving timbre)?
I go back to my original post where I spoke of the problem of positivism -- and I am hardly anywhere near original here -- and assert that KS and his contemporaries were nowhere NEAR as skeptical as they should have been about the nature of serial thinking and the degree to which it could communicate something about its structure -- and thus, paradoxically, it is limited in its ability to communicate something beyond its structure, other than by traditional standards rather primitive sounding gestural and dramatic tropes (louder, more pointillistic, thicker, narrow vs. wide register).
Well, you'll find few more trenchant critics of positivism than myself. But on another level, I wonder if a problem is not engendered by the application of a certain positivist (or at least empiricist) mindset to the very conception of
Gestalten? If one believes that there is not much music in which the ear does not perceive some connections between individual sounds (as I would say is the case), then is the question maybe not so much whether this is the case, as whether such things resonate clearly with pre-formed (reified) categories? So that, say, music with very recognisable gestural shapes tends to produce a more positive (and comforting?) response than that which radically exceeds such categories? A positivist tends to think of these things in static rather than dynamic, ever-developing and mutating, entities. On the other hand, that leads me back to the conundrum that Adorno identified (and which I think is one of the central dilemmas of contemporary music) - the more music tries to avoid reification and enter into a more dialectical and/or critical relationship with inherited musical language, the more it runs the risk of rendering itself in the realms of the esoteric and thus possibly ornamental? Is it possible to create something meaningful in music without its meaningfulness being thus ignored by the majority of listeners?
This is where it alienates its audience, by not convincing the audience to stop hearing Gestalten at face value, and instead come to hear them both for what they are and as composites of individual sounds or even the parameters of sounds.
Again, I'm not so sure about that, not least because I do think a lot of contemporary music produces
Gestalten which can often be taken on face value (also that some degree of dissolution of
Gestalten into their individual sonic components can be found in Debussy or even Schubert). But I think we come at this from massively different perspectives: I don't really see the 'emancipation' of individual sounds or sonic parameters as such an intrinsic aspect of new music, or at least it is not what makes a lot of it important for me. Rather I see it in broader terms of providing forms of experience that stand in a particular type of critical and dialectical relationship to other aspects of contemporary history and culture (and this can sometimes be achieved by music that uses various degrees of tonal procedures as well). Even pieces very deeply involving the inner qualities of sound and sounds, such as, for example, some of Radulescu's earlier spectral works, impress me because of the type of hypnotic, sensuous, impassioned, delirious sensations they present (without, I think, needing to resort to techniques of manipulation), which themselves stand in a certain critical relationship to the more materialistic, petty, selfish, consumerist, atomised aspects of our time (and other recent decades). The sound and sounds remain a means to an end (I would even say that about Cage as well).
We do not hear the subtle shift that takes place as parameters change, the way one could see the effect on a lighting design when just one fader is moved from 0 to 10.... i.e., audiences are not discouraged from bringing in their traditional criteria (e.g., consonance and dissonance as carriers of dramatic tension), against which the music is, in the worst case, a hopeless jumble.
I suppose the question I force myself to ask when thinking about this is whether contemporary composers have really been able to come up with musical means as sophisticated in their potential (not least for the role played by individual pitches) as in functional tonality. But at the same time very little new music is wholly free of some tonal implications. And that does not have to be seen as something necessarily reactionary. If high abstraction was mostly a product of the 1950s (and even then only applied to certain composers' work), and even that it accorded with the period of 'collective amnesia' in Germany in particular (that's a hypothesis at the moment, not an assertion - this is an area I'm exploring in my current research), then the re-engagement with 'tradition' (and not just Western art traditions) that came about in the 1960s could (and did) take various forms: either a serious attempt to deal with historically-sedimented material in a dialectical fashion (as in Schnebel, possibly Clementi, the later B.A. Zimmermann, Lachenmann, Huber, Spahlinger, Kagel, Donatoni to an extent, Ferneyhough, Sciarrino, Finnissy and some others) or the simple appropriation of reified cliches for rather easy 'effect' as seemed the only survival strategy in the face of an all-encompassing culture industry (some Berio, Penderecki, some would say Rihm, later Henze, certainly work that came later such as that of Rochberg, Zorn, Turnage, Ades, etc.). The former category employed attitudes to
history for the purposes of producing consonance and dissonance and thus dramatic tension. And to some extent I do not believe such an approach would have been possible, or at least likely, without the types of ruptured and defamiliarised relationships between aspects of a musical work that were inherited from serialism.
others have moved toward a radical kind of reduction (such as Spahlinger and Huber). In these latter composers, we kind of HAVE TO contemplate the compositeness of sounds; they are deconstructed before our very ears!
They certainly deal with the minutae of sounds (especially Huber), but the results I hear in a very different way to you, I think. The attempt to find new expressive possibilities in sound seems to spring from an attempt to salvage some continuing possibilities of development from history, rather than constituting such an abstract phenomenon. Huber's
Informationen über die die Töne E-F or
Harakiri are grounded as much in history as in sound. They are not so much about negating innate aspects of perception as negating (in the sense of
Kritik rather than didactic inversion) particular historical uses for which certain combinations of perceptions have been employed.
With few exceptions, it is fruitless to apply traditional gestural/dramatic criteria to these composers:
But those 'traditional gestural/dramatic criteria' are not such an static phenomenon - they themselves changed very significantly over history. Mightn't Spahlinger and Huber (and others) in some sense be continuing such a development?
they are tackling the problem of parametric thinking head-on. I believe the early serialists didn't do that, nor do they do it today.
Well, that leads me back to the possibly 'naive' aspect of early serialism. With a certain blindness towards the relationship of what some of those composers were doing in terms of its relationship to tradition (Boulez was perhaps least susceptible to this), they might have been unwittingly reiterating some of its tropes in a relatively undialectical fashion. For all the sophistication of his techniques, Stockhausen often to my ears reiterates a certain type of Wagnerian grandeur without much critical mediation (something that Lachenmann, Huber or Spahlinger would never do, for whatever that's worth) whilst Nono comes at times perillously close to a certain handed-down 'lyricism', operating in a musical culture where the type of category of subjectivity that was established by Beethoven had not yet reached full fruition. If there's something that might be called a weakness in early serialists, it might be as much down to a lack of self-awareness and historical awareness as a failure to thoroughly address the problems of parametric thinking? Though certain more macroscopic and aesthetic concerns (and social concerns) I would also call 'parameters'.
