That piece by Webern is a twelve-tone composition not a serial one. Musical palindromes like this were already used in the Middle Ages. Run along now.

"So what?" we ask. In the eighteenth century there was "already" slavery. That is no argument for its restoration in our more enlightened times. Run along yourself!

OK - that wasn't clear - I was trying to emphasise the distinction between what the sounds are, and how (and whether) they are meaningful in a wider context.

But we are both more skeptical of its possibilities than was KS in ca. 1961[/quote]
Actually not necessarily! It depends whether you see 1961 as the time when Stockhausen was optimistic enough to apply serial principles so broadly as he did in Momente, begun that year. All things told that's not one of KS's stronger pieces, I'd say, and so in that case then I am more sceptical. But I think there was further potential (and continues) in the types of idioms that Stockhausen created in Gruppen and Carré and some aspects of Kontakte.

But does anything totally destroy 'the semantic content of the sounds in question' (semantics is a troublesome metaphor for the workings music, of course) or simply create new semantic possibilities, moving beyond reified semantics, as music has done (especially Beethoven's music) for a long time?

Maybe also some scepticism to the rather loose use of the term 'deconstructed'?

No, I can't go with that, because it is founded upon a reified idea of the Gestalt.

This is not particularly a performer's point of view (and I do also compose a bit, though not really in a serial vein), more simply one of a listener and one who studies this work away from the keyboard as well. Tonal composers always spent a lot of their energy considering concatenations of individual pitches and rhythms as well, of course, just according to different organising principles. But what the composers spend most time thinking about is not necessarily the same as what is intrinsic to what they produce. There is a danger in the model you seem to be presenting of continuing to 'centre' things upon the composer as the source of all meaning, to which I'd respond with a quote from Gramsci (from 'Individualism and Art', which comes from the Prison Notebooks; this passage constitutes something of a retort to Croce's ideas):

If one cannot think of the individual apart from society, and thus if one cannot think of any individual who is not historically conditioned, it is obvious that every individual, including the arts and all his activities, cannot be thought of apart from society, a specific society. Hence the artist does not write or paint - that is, he does not externalize his phantasms - just for his own recollection, to be able to relive the moment of creation. He is an artist only insofar as he externalizes, objectifies and historicizes his phantasms. Every artist-individual, though, is such in a more or less broad and comprehensive way, he is 'historical' or 'social' to a greater or lesser degree.

That's not necessarily incompatible - it depends on the extent to which one sees perception as a historical category (see below).

Yes; however, the sensuous can be a widely meaningful category to many with little conscious apprehension of structure, though. I prefer to think of a work's unfolding and inner relationships relative to time (as time is a category of perception), rather than 'structure'.

Don't really want to open up that can of worms again! Rather conceive the camps in terms of their differing relationship to the broader culture and the culture industry (though that is at the heart of the Modernist/Postmodernist divide).

Wasn't terribly clear - was literally meaning a consonant/dissonant relationship to history (and to reified, commodified history, towards which the postmodernists tend to have an excessively consonant relationship).

Errr - I do believe in some innate aspects of perception (quite simply to do with acoustics), so agreement is still a little way off here! But valorisation of certain phenomena with employ such aspects of perception is most definitely historical in all senses.

Maybe! But innovation, including radical innovation, is itself absolutely part of 'tradition' as well. Tradition only becomes objectified after its time.

cf. Lachenmann, Affekt und Aspekt... whereby I would say that Lachenmann's attitude to this resource is considerably less rejectionist as Huber or Spahlinger. Pieces like Tanzsuite, Mouvement, Harmonica, Ausklang, Accanto, certainly rubbed some of the others the wrong way because the "critical mediation" was insufficiently apparent. A very interesting period of our recent history![/quote]
Certainly (and one of Lachenmann's strongest essays, also)! Highly explicit critical mediation, in the way it might be said to be employed by some of the other composers, can easily become reified and manneristic itself; I think that's one reason why Lachenmann chose to move beyond (without wholly rejecting) the type of approach he employed in Pression, Gran Torso, Schwankungen and so on. Accanto could be argued to constitute a more sophisticated form of critical mediation than some of the works from a similar period by Schnebel and Kagel that explicitly engaged with traditional works. But do you not think that Mouvement and Tanzsuite might equally be criticised for a certain didacticism (or maybe that was part of the particular critique you were referring to)?

This is surely a matter of taste though, isn't it? For me Momente certainly is one of his stronger pieces, partly because of the way that its serial structure makes itself felt audibly in a way that isn't true of most of the music KS composed in the preceding few years. I suppose it might be criticised on the grounds of wearing its skeleton on its sleeve, so to speak, but the imagination at work within this framework has always struck me as quite astonishing.

Well, in one sense all value judgements are matters of taste, though some are meaningful beyond the first person, in terms of their criteria. I simply find that Momente sounds rather banal and staid in places.

Hey, don't get so shirty at a casual comment (sometimes it does seem as if a contrary opinion on a piece you like is taken very personally)! It's a little while since I last listened to it, if you really want lots of detailed comments on why it generates that impression, I'll listen to it again in detail and come back on that. One thing I might say is that the piece takes itself a mite too seriously....

Another go?

I also believe in further potential, in many things, but that doesn't exclude skepticism. I feel most comfortable if the music itself can somehow convey skepticism about its own means, even as it explores them. Sorry to personify music here.

No, doesn't destroy it permanently, nor even for very long; but there are moments when listening to a new thing that one gets the sense of 'staring into the void' before one constructs a semantic context for it. This sense of disorientation is one that not few composers of our time have attempted to sustain as long as possible. I can't help but think that for KS the serial structure itself wanted to replace that semantic context, when in fact for the individual listener that serial structure played only a small to vanishing role in the highly personal process of constructing sense.

Yes, one can't deconstruct everything, let alone everything at once. One carefully dissects the Gestalts in which one is interested.

I suppose I'm being too metaphorical again. Nowhere in Schubert or Debussy do I hear something that causes me to reconsider, i.e. partly jettison, my criteria for constructing sense, though I may want to broaden them.

To the Gramsci quote I can only say that composers are only doing themselves a favor by considering their role in society and the role of their work, but that doesn't preclude asking oneself questions such as "What are sounds outside of the context constructed by a listening subject?"
And one cannot answer that question simply by declaring one's sounds to be "emancipated." That is where my skepsis comes from. Actually, it comes from Spahlinger (to paraphrase): we cannot know what sounds are outside of our constructs (was klingt in wirklichkeit), but we can come to be aware of the mechanics of our own sense construction. Then it becomes clear that that which we call "sense" only exists thanks to mutual agreement (vereinbarungen), and could just as well have been different.
The composer needs to try to stand outside of history and social forces, even if history does end up subsuming or ignoring him or her -- but that just means history has changed (in the first case) or passed him/her over (in the second case).

No it's not incompatible, but see above re Gramsci .

Well, you said simple, and I said trivial. Acoustics may be innate, but I don't think we'll get far trying to parse historical and biological influences on our listening. It's safe to table that as a different topic.

Spahlinger and Huber want to resist objectification, and their resistance I read as having a certain "once and for all" quality about it. I don't deny that that may be an illusion, and that perhaps they know it's an illusion, but it's something akin to Beckett's Endgame or Mal vu, mal dit or similar works of profound existential experience... I'm not sure those have been successfully objectified yet, for example.

In order to trivialize the whole debate (what made it such an interesting period), let's just "forgive" Lachenmann these pieces by saying there are many kinds of critical mediation; Lachenmann just had a different idea of which ones might be more pressing -- or more fruitful -- or more to his liking -- three very different sorts of motivations.