Found Sounds UNCG Musicology Journal Volume IV - Spring 2020 Table of Contents Twelve-Tone Serialism and Its Effect on Modern Audiences - Kenan Baker Page 2 - Abstract by Editor Reimagination of the Requiem: From “For the Mass” to “For the Masses” - Yophi Bost Page 26 - Abstract by Editor An Introduction to Music in Pakistan - Enoch Robbins Page 36 Editor - Enoch Robbins 1 Twelve-Tone Serialism and Its Effect on Modern Audiences Kenan Baker Abstract: Twelve-tone music and serial composition are controversial topics for musicians and composers. This paper catalogs the early emergence of this practice, the opinions of composers on the craft itself, and their opinions on audience attitudes toward twelve-tone music. The conclusion is reached that serialism is generally too academic, written with professional musicians in mind, alienating the listener. The more successful modern composers have tempered their writing with more conventional harmony and tonality. 2 Twelve-Tone Serialism and Its Effect on Modern Audiences Kenan Baker Twelve-tone music and serial composition is a controversial topic for musicians and composers. It offers composers a way to create music that is free from traditional tonality, an originality which is difficult to create using tonality. On the other hand, the difficulties of understanding and enjoying twelve-tone music is usually enough to dissuade musical audiences from listening to any pieces composed in this style. On top of this, composer writings on modernism implies a divide on “high and low art music,” music meant for academic settings and music meant for popular listening. This paper aims to explain why modern audiences have negative reactions when listening to twelve-tone music. To do this, I will first read about the history of twelve-tone music in the twentieth-century, and the negative stigma which is often so closely associated to this style of music. Essays by Milton Babbitt, music reviews of modern pieces by Tim Page, and an understanding of twelve-tone in American music by Straus' book will help us understand these issues. By understanding composer attitudes toward musical audiences, we can gain a better understanding as to why audiences avoid music composed at this time. Once we understand some of the negative stigma surrounding twelve-tone music, we can understand how twelve-tone went mostly unlistened to by musical audiences. Another reason as to why modern audiences don’t enjoy twelve-tone music is the way which we perceive atonal and tonal music, and how our preconceptions of tonality in the past creates a bar to listening to modernist pieces. By analyzing the lives of serialist composers, along with composers with serialist musical training, we can 3 glean an understanding of what each of these composers did to use serialism in composition and create music that was new and original at the time. Understanding what composers of the 20th ​ century did to distance themselves from audiences and create their music will help us understand how music has been shaped the way it is today and why audiences enjoy certain genres of music over others. Serialism in composition is still a popular medium of composition today, regardless of negative opinions and criticisms of composers in the nineteenth through twentieth-century. Yet, the writing and listening of serial music is still subject to widespread criticism from both general audiences and fellow musicians. Part of the reason why twelve-tone serialism may be disliked is due to a lack of understanding of how the music is created, and an inability to grasp how to listen to the music. Milton Babbitt put reasons behind these issues of an unreceptive audience to twelve-tone music in his essay “Who Cares If You Listen,” published in the music magazine High ​ Fidelity in 1958. In a revised version, Babbitt begins the essay by stating that his original title for ​ the article was intended to be “The Composer As Specialist,” as he is more concerned about the 1 composer taking advantage of their “societal isolation” in order to create meaningful art music. He argued that the composer should embrace the fact that their music may be unpopular, because general audiences will have no way of understanding the process of how the music is created. Babbitt compares understanding serial composition to understanding advanced mathematics and sciences, arguing that general audience's ability to grasp twelve-tone music is comparable to understanding advanced mathematical theory. In his words, “Advanced music...scarcely can be 1 Milton Babbitt, “Who Cares If You Listen? (The Composer As Specialist),” In Collected Work: ​ Composers On Modern Musical Culture: An Anthology Of Readings on Twentieth-Century Music, Published by: New York, NY: G. Schirmer, 1999, 1 4 expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical 2 education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields.” This attitude toward general audiences in music portrayed composers of twelve-tone music as elitists. Though this wasn't Babbitt's intention, it was clear that understanding serialist music became more difficult the more complex the music became. Babbitt would go on to say in a personal interview, “I simply had to face the fact that we had a tiny audience for our music, one made up mainly of 3 professionals.” Babbitt argues that the listener for twelve-tone music requires greater “perceptual 4 and conceptual abilities,” needed to make sense of the music. But it seems what ended up happening is that most listeners at the time were not interested in developing a taste for twelve-tone music. Babbitt said, “...we thought we could appeal to what might have been described as our fellow intellectuals with our words...we discovered that what was taken even 5 more resentfully than taking music seriously was talking about music seriously.” It seems that ​ ​ twelve-tone composers could not even broach the subject of talking about their music seriously without resentment from the general public Twelve-tone serialism avoids the sense of expectation that tonal music has by systematically eliminating any sense of tonal center which our ears could latch onto. The music of Schoenberg is an excellent example of using tone rows to eliminate tonality, actively avoiding even a hint of tonal centers in the tone rows. Philip Ball quotes this active avoidance of tonality in the music of Schoenberg, stating: 2 Ibid., 3. 3 Tim Page, Music From the Road: Views and Reviews 1978-1992, New York, Oxford ; Oxford ​ ​ University Press, 1992, 13 4 Babbitt, Ibid., 2. 5 Page, Ibid., 13 5 In other words, it seems that Schoenberg preferentially selected those rows that banish tonality most effectively. For this reason, Huron argues that serial composition should not be regarded as 'atonal' at all. Rather, the system is deliberately contratonal: not casually 6 ignoring tonality, but taking great pains to eliminate all trace of it. This quote also illuminates an important point about composing twelve-tone music. Our listening experience uses tonality to make sense of music. When the tone rows are composed with the 7 elimination of tonality in mind, the composition rules out a “tonal hierarchy.” Without tonality to guide the listener, the forms which music uses to make sense of itself such as harmony, phrasing, and form become obscured, even for the nuanced listener. Early reviews of Schoenberg developing the twelve-tone method seem to agree with this notion that, without tonality, the rest of the music becomes difficult to understand. Alma Mahler's description of Schoenberg's music in 1900 was that it was, “unbelievably showy but without the slightest concession to an ear accustomed to melody....Not a crescendo reaches its peak smoothly. By no means 8 uninteresting-but beautiful...?” Twelve-tone also complicates music by using octave displacement in melodies to further abstract the melodic contour of the twelve-tone row. An untrained musician may be able to sing a familiar melody using the same intervals of a melodic line, even if it is in the wrong key. Babbitt said that a retrograde inversion is the “easiest thing in the world to hear,” because its a repetition 9 of intervals that we are used to hearing. However, twelve-tone serialists tend to jump octaves and 6 Huron, D. and P. von Hippel, 2000, “Tonal and contra-tonal structure of Viennese twelve-tone rows,” Paper presented at the Society for Music Theory Conference, Toronto, Canada, Quoted in Philip Ball, “Schoenberg, Serialism and Cognition: Whose Fault If No One Listens?” Interdisciplinary Science ​ Reviews: no. 1, 32 ​ 7 Ibid., 32. 8 Joseph Auner, Music In the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: Western Music in Context, New ​ ​ York, London ; W.W. Norton and Company, 2013, 36 9 Page, Ibid., 14. 6 create a melodic contour that becomes not only difficult to sing, but difficult to recognize even if 10 it is a familiar melody. So even if the serialist will play with the twelve-tone row in their composition by means of an inversion or retrograde of the tone row, when the original row's melody is complicated with octave displacement, then we can't sing it or hear it. These factors working against the auditory cognition of the piece is part of the reason why listeners feel lost when it comes to twelve-tone music. The form of the music lacks “cognitive transparency” in listening, and by creating music without a clear melody, audiences have trouble 11 understanding and enjoying the music on a meaningful level. Schoenberg created twelve-tone music not as a system to create unlikable music, but to avoid creating tonal music which had dominated the past. His system successfully created music that avoided the use of old conventions of musical form, diatonic harmony, and note expectation.