Well, you are coming at that music from the perspective of the late-20th/early-21st century, when the means by which those and other composers re-determined how musical sense could be established are now well-known and have been very extensively developed. They probably sounded quite different in their own times. And that could also be the case with serial music if it were better-known.

Does that not ultimately amount to the question of the existence of external reality, independently of a perceiving subject, at all? Because whoever attempts to discern such an answer is, well, a listening subject.

Yes, agreed.

Yes, but...

Not wholly so, I think. When I spoke elsewhere 'simply' about acoustic matters, that wasn't to imply they are a simple or trivial matter. Stockhausen's dissonant harmonies may be less dissonant to those who are used to even more dissonant ones, but still in some sense their dissonance is not purely a cultural construct, I would say.

Maybe there's a type of faultline between those two possibilities where a composer might aim for? Not easy to attain, though.

Well, we can still look at how sounds form themselves into particular hierarchies, progressions, in terms of pitch, rhythm and other parameters, without it being a wholly culturally-determined matter, I believe. And indeed that is important in the context of serial and other music.

I don't feel there's a need to 'forgive' those pieces at all - they are excellent! And, in response to Richard's post, whilst Lachenmann may not have been able to find much more mileage solely from such an approach, still his later works would have been unthinkable without these achievements.

I mean quite simply how when certain sounds are combined or juxtaposed, the ear perceives certain hierarchies, at least in part for acoustic reasons. Serial music seems to work in full awareness of this (thus avoiding certain intervals that would produce unwanted properties) rather than simply ignoring it. If part of a row outlines a triad, I don't believe it sounds consonant simply because we are conditioned to hear it that way.

Just saying that if a piece creates musical sense, I don't think how the composer brought that about makes it better or worse (only interested in such things in terms of studying compositional technique, to learn how to build upon those achievements oneself).

My point is that the music can only work in as full an awareness of this as the composer has, and our awareness of these mechanisms is still evolving and rather far from "full". It is fascinating to observe traditional criteria (RB: "associations") constantly sneaking in through the back door and getting in the way of the desired (i.e., not "unwanted") listening. It is interesting to try to neutralize the old listening "habits," even where one fails to do so.

Whether dodecaphony is serialism or not is a long-standing confusion. Some don't apply the second term to the first phenomenon, and some do.

Well, maybe because the religious/'spiritual' tradition from which Messiaen emerges, and all the symbolism, ideas, etc., that accompany it (which do feed Messiaen's work), have a rather more distinguished and sophisticated intellectual and artistic pedigree than those espoused by Stockhausen?

I would guess this to be because the former seems suggestive of a certain characteristic of the music itself and the latter more indicative of a pursuit like any other "ism"...

"The civil service of the cosmos", indeed! I've never heard that one before so am indebted to you for bringing it into the arena now. It sounds like a put-down worthy of Dorothy Parker (not that she was ever likely to have had any views about Stockhausen, of course). While on this humourous interlude, discussion of this aspect of Stockhausen and mention of this phrase reminds me of a press cutting from 30-odd years ago from the critic Martin Cooper entitled "Stockhausen's Cosmic Trips" which was given me by Kaikhosru Sorabji, albeit not before he had taken his red pen to that title and turned it into "Stockhausen's Comic Strips"...

Best,

Alistair

For me, the problem with the later work (and I'll hold my hand up to not seeing an ENTIRE opera/part of Licht staged fully) is that he extracts works from these and bases other smaller works on the themes/leitmotifs and they remain unconvincing on their own. I think Aries is a bloody great laugh, and I actually like the turn-of-the-80s sounding tape part, but as an autonomous piece removed from it's context, it seems to me to be less successful than (if I may) the extractable elements of RB's Dark Matter.

And for what it's worth, I always make the distiction to my students between dodecaphony and serialism (rather than using the terms integral or total serialism which seem to be interchangeable and on which no-one can agree validity).

I've only seen one section of Mittwoch staged and that was the Orchestral Soloists movement which was really only memorable for its absurdity.
Young performers take it in turn to perform a solo on their instrument.
The tape part seems to be recordings of various different locations (I seem to remember a dock with boats and seagulls) which seems to have very little connection with the solos taking place on stage.
Finally, a mummy appears at the back of the stage holding a dinner gong, and slowly walks to the front where it strikes the gong and leads the soloists off. From the moment the mummy appears, you know what's going to happen. From the moment that the first soloist begins their (as far as I recall) deeply uninteresting solo, you know kind of how the piece is going to work.
It's supposed to be a satire on conservatoire exams but I think that it really needed a sense of humour.
I was a callow youth when I saw/heard this so please leap in with alternative views of this piece.

I rather like the way that Ferneyhough has resisted the modular release of those 2 scenes from Shadowtime that he feels just don't work on their own and it's something of a shame that KS can't recognise when things just don't work.