A Revisionist History of Twelve-Tone Serialism in American Music

Journal of the Society for American Music (2008) Volume 2, Number 3, pp. 355–395.

C 2008 The Society for American Music doi:10.1017/S1752196308080115
A Revisionist History of Twelve-Tone Serialism

in American Music
JOSEPH N. STRAUS
Abstract
The history of twelve-tone serial music in the United States extends from the late 1920s to the
present day. Practitioners of a distinctively American brand of twelve-tone music have included
many well-known composers in three distinct waves of activity: prewar experimentation by
native-born “ultra-modern” composers amid an influx of European émigrés; a postwar boom;
and a third wave of twelve-tone activity since 1980. This extensive repertoire shares certain
structural features, including twelve-note aggregates and serial ordering, but even these very
general compositional commitments are subject to individual modification, and American
twelve-tone serial music has taken astonishingly varied forms. To give an accurate account
of this music’s history, we must first pry away the many myths that have accreted around it.
In the process, we will need to abandon historiographical models that focus on one or two
“great men” and that describe the history of style as a series of changing fashions. This article
proposes that we regard American music since 1925 as a dynamic steady state within which mo-
dernist styles, including twelve-tone serialism, persist as vibrant strands within the postmodern
musical fabric.
The history of twelve-tone music in the United States begins in May 1927, the month
Adolph Weiss returned from studying with Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin and
composed the first twelve-tone pieces written in the United States by an American
composer.1 Weiss became an important source of information for American “ultra-
modern” composers (including Henry Cowell, Wallingford Riegger, Ruth Crawford,
and Carl Ruggles) only three years after Schoenberg had first explained his new
“method of composing with twelve tones” to his students.
Early twelve-tone composition by ultra-modern composers received a boost in
the 1930s when first Schoenberg and then a small wave of European twelve-tone
composers (including Ernst Krenek, Stefan Wolpe, and Hanns Eisler) arrived in
the United States to escape Nazism and the war. Their arrival had an impact
not only on music in the States, giving a new impetus to indigenous twelve-tone
writing, but also on their own music: the European twelve-tone composers became
Americanized to some extent, their twelve-tone styles modified by the change in
their circumstances. The combined efforts of indigenous serialists and émigrés laid
the groundwork for an upsurge of twelve-tone compositional activity during and
after the Second World War. During the 1950s and 1960s, twelve-tone music became
a prominent part of the contemporary music scene in the United States. A number
1
I shall use the term “twelve-tone” to refer to music that deals in some systematic way with
the aggregate of all twelve tones and the term “serial” to refer to music that employs serial ordering,
that is, with ordered presentations of pitch classes and with serial transformation (i.e., transposition,
inversion, retrograde, and combinations of these). This article addresses music that is either twelve-
tone or serial or, as is often the case, both. I shall avoid the common use of the term serial to refer to
European-style postwar “integral serialism.”
355
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356 Straus
of established composers (including Stravinsky, Copland, and Sessions) modified

their compositional approach, influenced by these developments. Many composers
of the next generation came to maturity as twelve-tone composers (including Milton
Babbitt and George Perle) or modified an earlier style (including George Rochberg,
Louise Talma, Ross Lee Finney, Arthur Berger, and Irving Fine), followed by yet
another group of composers who grew up in the twelve-tone tradition (including
Donald Martino, Ursula Mamlok, and Charles Wuorinen). Although the extent to
which these composers dominated the music of this period is debatable, twelve-tone
composition flowered in the United States in the decades following the war.
Beginning in the 1970s, twelve-tone music became less fashionable, but many
composers continued to write it. While some composers (Rochberg and David Del
Tredeci, for instance) turned away from twelve-tone composition, others (Elliott
Carter and Ralph Shapey, for instance) found new ways of writing it. And although
by this time twelve-tone music had been deemed passé, the longevity and continued
activity of the leaders of the style (Babbitt, Martino, Wuorinen, Mamlok, Perle,
Carter, among others) and the interest of a later generation of composers (including
Joseph Schwantner, Peter Lieberson, Robert Morris, Andrew Mead, Jeff Nichols,
Louis Karchin, Jonathan Dawe, Dan Welcher, and Judd Danby, among others),
have ensured that twelve-tone music has remained an important part of American
contemporary music into the first decade of the twenty-first century, continuing a
vigorous tradition that has lasted for more than eighty years.
This extensive repertoire shares certain structural features, most notably the
aggregate of all twelve tones as a referential harmonic unit and an ordered succession
of tones as a source of motives, melodies, and harmonies. But even these very general
compositional commitments are subject to individual modification, and American
twelve-tone serial music has taken astonishingly varied forms. In many cases, twelve-
tone music coexists with contrasting music within a single piece or movement. This
is a distinguishing feature of “ultra-modern” twelve-tone composition, and has
remained a consistent trend since then. In many cases (see, for example, the music
of Talma, Gunther Schuller, and Hale Smith), twelve-tone structures are used in
conjunction with, or in expression of, traditional tonality or current popular music.
In many cases (see, for example, the music of Stravinsky, Wolpe, Sessions, and
Mamlok), the aggregate is not a surface feature of the music but rather is part of its
precompositional design: the music is full of doublings and emphases of all kinds,
with direct statements of the complete aggregate a relative rarity. In every case,
composers have created idiomatic and highly individual compositional designs—
each has a distinctive way of composing serially.
Both the history and content of twelve-tone composition in the United States
have long been mischaracterized in journalistic accounts and scholarly literature.
Indeed, it is difficult to identify another repertoire so harshly attacked and little
understood. This article aims to revise the history of American twelve-tone music
by confronting some of the many myths that have accreted around it. In the process,
I shall argue against two historiographic fallacies: the fallacy of the “great man” and
the fallacy of stylistic evolution.
Twelve-tone music in the US is far from a monolith. As a result, many of the
sweeping generalizations that appear in the literature are either simply false or apply
A Revisionist History of Twelve-Tone Serialism in American Music 357
to only a relatively small handful of works within a very large and varied repertoire.
A widespread illusion is promoted that the music by one or two “great men”
(usually Schoenberg and Babbitt) may be taken as representative or typical. There
are, however, as many ways of writing twelve-tone music as there are composers of
twelve-tone music—each composer finds a distinctive path, one that may change
over time. Composers of twelve-tone music in the US are as varied as their music, in
their gender, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, places of origin and residence,
and professional circumstances. Instead of focusing on only one or two heroic
figures and ignoring the rest, we must come to terms with the astonishing variety of
twelve-tone music composed over the past eighty years. A more complete history of
twelve-tone composition should not rely primarily on scholarly writings and jour-
nalistic accounts of this repertoire that are based on the composers’ prose but should
examine the music itself. This article accordingly offers brief, thumbnail sketches
of the twelve-tone compositional style of more than thirty composers in order to
offer a revisionist history grounded in the realities of compositional practice.
This article thus questions what has become an unjustifiably evolutionary his-
toriography of American music since 1925, especially with regard to the position
of twelve-tone music. Most historical accounts regrettably ignore the presence of
twelve-tone music in the United States before and during the Second World War;
virtually all historical accounts ignore its presence after 1970, even though many
major composers have continued to produce serial music. These failures partly
stem from an overriding interest in whatever is most fashionable—because twelve-
tone music came to seem passé, it has tended to disappear from our historical
accounts. Rather than engaging the traditional metaphors of stylistic rise and fall,
and imagining our cultural landscape as a zero-sum game where yesterday’s winners
are today’s losers, this article proposes that we regard American music since 1925 as
a dynamic steady state within which twelve-tone serialism has long been, and still
remains, a persistent presence.
The myths that have gathered around twelve-tone music in the United States
have obscured its range and variety, its historical longevity, its most salient musical
characteristics, and its position in American musical culture, both in an earlier
period and in the present day. By identifying and debunking twelve particularly
persistent and pernicious myths, I offer a more balanced musical and historical
understanding of this important repertoire.
Myth No. 1: The Myth of Serial Origins

The myth of serial origins maintains that serialism burst upon the musical scene in
the United States essentially as a postwar European import.
After the war neoclassicism and a folklike Americanism had waning appeal to younger
composers. Like the late teens, the late ’40s seemed a time bomb waiting to go off. Around
1950, it happened. All hell, it seemed, broke loose. Serious composers, experimental in the
1920s, socially aware in the 1930s, and quieted by war in the 1940s, suddenly diverged in
two totally different but equally radical paths. Some, extending ideas of Arnold Schoen-
berg and Anton Webern, sought total determination of every nuance of a piece through
mathematical calculations; others, exploring various chance and indeterminate techniques,
wanted to eliminate the will and emotion of the composer. But all seemed to be moving
358 Straus
away from mainstream audiences, and for the second time in thirty years the American
musical landscape changed drastically.2
Contrary to the myth, the twelve-tone serial enterprise in the United States has
had a high degree of continuity from the indigenous ultra-modern movement
centered around Cowell in the late 1920s and early 1930s, through the arrival of
Schoenberg and other European émigrés in the 1930s, and continuing with music
written during and immediately after the war by Riegger, Babbitt, Perle, Weber, and
others. The flowering of twelve-tone activity in the 1950s has its roots in these earlier
efforts, and continues them without significant break. The myth of serial origins
seems to arise from a conflation of the American and European experiences. The
European serialists, known loosely as the Darmstadt School, spoke often of a need
to start the musical world anew, to make a fresh beginning.3 In the United States,
however, there was no sense of creation out of the ruins, no sense of a radical new
beginning, no “zero hour.” Rather, American musical activity, including twelve-
tone compositional activity, shows a striking degree of coherence and continuity
before, during, and after the war.
The first phase of serialism in the United States unfolded largely under the
banner of Cowell’s New Music enterprises, including performances, publications,
and recordings.4 What serial music there was in the 1920s and 1930s was published,
performed, and discussed in media sponsored by Cowell. The small group of ultra-
modern composers gathered around Cowell (Weiss, Riegger, Ruggles, Crawford)
adopted Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method because it intersected and amplified
some of their own concerns, including a linear/contrapuntal approach to music
(reacting against a Romantic texture of melody and chords) and a commitment to
“dissonance” (in Charles Seeger’s broad terms). They wanted to write “dissonant
counterpoint,” and Schoenberg’s method, as they chose to understand it, permitted
them to do so.5
2
Michael Broyles, Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2004), 154. I will return later to the inaccurate notion that postwar American serial practice
involves the “total determination of every nuance of a piece through mathematical calculations”; my
focus here is on the problematic claim that this music emerged from nowhere.
3
“Many textbook accounts of the immediate post-war years unreflectively present the European
case—the Zero Hour mentality and the corresponding euphoric sense of building something from the
ground up—as the norm, without taking the quite different American situation into consideration.”
Anne Shreffler, “The Myth of Empirical Historiography: A Response to Joseph N. Straus,” The Musical
Quarterly 84/1 (Winter 2000): 33.
4
See Rita H. Mead, Henry Cowell’s New Music, 1925–1936: The Society, the Music Editions, and
the Recordings (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1981).
5
Roughly speaking, dissonant counterpoint involves 1) melodic lines that avoid repetition of
notes or intervals and avoid outlining consonant triads, but which nonetheless maintain a high
degree of motivic consistency; and 2) independence of such melodic lines within a contrapuntal
texture, with the traditionally dissonant intervals (especially minor seconds, major sevenths, and
their compounds) formed between them. Seeger’s compositional approach, including his ideas about
dissonance and dissonant counterpoint, is set forth most clearly in his 1931 treatise, “Manual of
Dissonant Counterpoint,” in Studies in Musicology II, ed. Ann Pescatello, 163–228 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, [1931] 1994). Strikingly similar views are expressed by Cowell, Seeger’s former
student, in his 1930 treatise, New Musical Resources (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1930]
1996).
Adolph Weiss (1891–1971). Weiss was an important source for information about Schoen-
berg’s method, both through his personal contacts and a published article, at a time when
scores, performances, recordings, and written information were virtually unavailable.6
Weiss’s own twelve-tone music follows Schoenberg in relying on pairs or quartets of row
forms to define a “tonic” harmonic area and in frequent repetition of short, recognizable
motives.
Wallingford Riegger (1885–1961). In the 1920s, Riegger was already composing rugged,
dissonant, atonal music in what was emerging as a shared ultra-modern style, but he became
increasingly interested in the possibilities of the twelve-tone method. In 1932, he completed
his first piece that can be described as twelve-tone in significant respects (Dichotomy), and
thereafter most of his instrumental music was serial at least in part. In Riegger’s twelve-tone
music, the series (there is often more than one, and they do not always include all twelve
notes) are usually treated as melodic lines, specific as to pitch and contour. Typically, these
serial melodies are combined with non-serial pitch structures, either as distinct strands in
a polyphonic fabric or as distinct sections within a movement.
Carl Ruggles (1876–1971). For Ruggles, the overriding compositional goal was to write
sustained, non-triadic melodic lines that could be combined polyphonically; in short, to
write effective dissonant counterpoint. His only overt attempt to incorporate Schoenberg’s
twelve-tone method—his piano piece, Evocations II—uses two series, one of twelve notes
and the other of nine. The series permit him both to write the kind of dissonant melodic
lines and dissonant counterpoint he favored and, by projecting motives drawn from the
series over larger time spans, to control the large-scale design of the work as well.
Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901–53). Many of Crawford’s compositions involve precomposi-
tional schemes, some of them explicitly serial.7 Her particular brand of serialism involves
systematic, virtually mechanistic, patterns of rotation and transposition, designed to project
the same musical ideas simultaneously at various levels of structure. Crawford may have
been drawn to serialism for the same reasons that Ruggles was: it represented an intensi-
fication of her prior commitment to “dissonated” melody—i.e., melody that avoids pitch
repetitions and triadic arpeggiations—and it made possible a multi-level musical structure.
In addition, when juxtaposed with a free, non-serial melody, it permitted her to create
a radical stratification of the musical texture into two distinct and contrasting layers, a
“heterophonic” texture that was itself a basic element of the ultra-modern aesthetic.
The rise of Nazism in Germany caused many intellectuals to flee Europe for
safe haven in the United States. This influx of immigrants included prominent
twelve-tone composers, including Krenek, Wolpe, Eisler, Erich Itor Kahn, and, of
course, Schoenberg himself.8 When they arrived, they were able to make contact
with American ultra-modern composers, to the mutual benefit of guests and hosts.
After the Second World War ended, the European immigrants largely remained in
the United States, where they were able to provide context and continuity for a new
generation of twelve-tone composers.
6
Weiss’s published account of his studies with Schoenberg—“The Lyceum of Schoenberg,”
Modern Music 9 (1932): 99–107—is almost entirely concerned with issues of form and motivic
development. Weiss’s few comments in this article about twelve-tone composition inaccurately
characterize Schoenberg’s practice.
7
See Joseph N. Straus, “Ruth Crawford’s Precompositional Strategies,” in Ruth Crawford Seeger’s
Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth Century American Music, ed. Ray Allen and Ellie M.
Hisama, 33–56 (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2007).
8
See Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi German to the United States, ed.
Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
360 Straus
Schoenberg arrived in New York in 1933 (he was among the first musicians to
realize the implications of the Nazi rise to power) and immediately began teaching
at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston.9 His assistant and interpreter there was his
former student Adolph Weiss, and through Weiss, Schoenberg solidified his ties to
the circle of ultra-modern composers around Cowell and to Cowell himself. Cowell
and Weiss were important intermediaries for Schoenberg throughout his American
stay.10 Schoenberg’s arrival was celebrated by Cowell in print and served to energize
the musical avant-garde in the United States.11
Krenek, who settled in the United States in 1938, also had a significant and imme-
diate impact on the course of twelve-tone composition. During the war and after,
Krenek continued to compose a steady stream of innovative twelve-tone music. He
also lectured widely and published several accounts of twelve-tone composition—
for most American composers, these writings were among their principal sources
of information.12
Like Schoenberg, Wolpe left Germany in 1933, but took a more circuitous route
to the United States. He went first to Vienna, where he studied with Webern for four
months and began to write twelve-tone music. He then lived in Palestine for several
years before settling in New York in 1938. During his New York years, he immersed
himself in the new-music scene, as a composer of his own personal brand of twelve-
tone music, as a colleague (he maintained close personal connections with Milton
Babbitt, among others), and as a teacher (his students included Ralph Shapey and
Ursula Mamlok). As with Schoenberg and Krenek, Wolpe’s presence and influence
assured that the United States would be the home to an unbroken tradition of
twelve-tone composition spanning across the war years.
Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951). Schoenberg’s “American” twelve-tone music including
the Violin Concerto (1936), Piano Concerto (1942), Ode to Napoleon (1942), String Trio
(1946), Survivor from Warsaw (1947), and Violin Phantasy (1949) generally reveals a greater
comprehensibility and simplicity of approach, an increased interest in explicit tonal and
triadic references, and a growing tendency towards treating the hexachord, rather than
the twelve-tone row, as the basic generating shape.13 Partitional schemes (i.e., inventive
9
See Wayne R. Shoaf, “The Schoenberg-Malkin Correspondence,” Journal of the Arnold Schoen-
berg Institute 13/2 (November 1990): 164–257. Schoenberg later held positions at the University of
Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles but his material circumstances in
the United States were always somewhat precarious.
10
On the relationship between Schoenberg and Weiss, see Michael Hicks, “John Cage’s Studies
with Schoenberg,” American Music 8/2 (Summer 1990): 125–40; and W. B. George, “Adolph Weiss”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1971). On the relationship between Schoenberg and Cowell, see
Sabine Feisst, “Henry Cowell und Arnold Schönberg—eine unbekannte Freundschaft,” Archiv für
Musikwissenschaft 55/1 (1998): 57–71.
11
See Cowell, New Musical Resources.
12
See especially Ernst Krenek, Studies in Counterpoint Based on the Twelve-Tone Technique (New
York: G. Schirmer, 1940); and Ernst Krenek, “New Developments of the Twelve-Tone Technique,”
Music Review 4 (1943): 81–97. Krenek also exerted influence as a teacher—George Perle was among
his students.
13
Ethan Haimo, “The Late Twelve-tone Compositions,” in The Arnold Schoenberg Companion, ed.
Walter B. Bailey (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), 158: “There are some very convincing
reasons for us to think of Schoenberg’s late twelve-tone works as constituting a specific period in
Schoenberg’s twelve-tone output, a period in which there were a number of important concerns and
trends that either were not present in earlier works or, if present, were not prominent. In the late
divisions of the series into usable chunks), continuing hallmarks of Schoenberg’s approach,
assure that the row is not generally expressed as an explicit melodic theme, but functions
rather as a source of materials. Hexachordal inversional combinatoriality continues to be of
central interest, but is as much a way of creating doublings and reinforcements of all kinds
as a way of creating aggregates of all twelve pitch-classes.
Ernst Krenek (1900–91). From 1931 through the end of his long creative life, Krenek
composed twelve-tone music from a variety of angles. With Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae
(1942), Krenek devised a distinctive form of twelve-tone modality, one that influenced much
of his subsequent work. It involves composing a twelve-tone series that moves primarily
by melodic steps, dividing it into two hexachords, and rotating and/or transposing the
hexachords independently. Each hexachord, in its original or its rotated and/or transposed
form, functions not as an ordered theme or motive, but rather as a mode from which
characteristic shapes could be drawn. The result is a kind of twelve-tone music that can
easily imitate Renaissance polyphony and which only exceptionally produces aggregates of
all twelve notes.
Stefan Wolpe (1902–72). Wolpe’s music characteristically depends on an underlying twelve-
tone series that controls both the order in which the entire aggregate is gradually explored
and the smaller pitch-class fields drawn from it. Because of the slow unfolding of the total
chromatic over the course of a section or piece, Wolpe often works with collections smaller
than the complete aggregate, usually groupings of four, five, or six notes (which he refers
to as “pitch constellations”).14 Form for Piano (1959) marks the beginning of Wolpe’s final
compositional period, one in which he abandoned Schoenbergian developing variation for
“the principle of the conjunction of opposites.”15 Wolpe’s later works, though twelve-tone
at a deep level, present surprising, unpredictable juxtapositions of contrasting material: the
music’s governing principle is juxtaposition rather than development; it is more spatial than
linear in conception.
The continued activity of ultra-modern composers (especially Riegger),

European émigrés (especially Schoenberg, Krenek, and Wolpe), and a younger
twelve-tone works, three general stylistic features become increasingly significant: (1) the interest
and willingness to make explicit triadic and tonal references, suggesting some kind of reconciliation
between serialism and tonality; (2) a heightened tendency to exploit symmetrical relationships;
(3) the growing treatment of the hexachord as a harmonic unit, with the concomitant diminishing
of the importance of a single serial ordering.” Similarly, see Reinhold Brinkmann, “Schoenberg
the Contemporary: A View from Behind,” in Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the
Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997), 211: “As is well known, Schoenberg’s American output differs
from that of the two European periods in various respects. One tendency defining the American
works could be labeled classicism; the turn to traditional genres of the concert repertory, such as
piano concerto or violin concerto, belongs here.”
14
“What is for me terribly important is a certain elegance of movement to which, naturally,
belongs everything from the sparsest and unhampered, untrammeled condition to a condition of
cloggedness and stuckness and a diabolic and fiendish density, like a beehive. So that I have a layout,
a very particular direction in regard to a particular situation, and in regard to a particular pitch
constellation how these things shall move. And my traffic sense is form. My operational sense—how
to operate in a state of densities—is based on elaborate systems of proportional interactions of these
bodies in the space of sound.” See Stefan Wolpe,“Stefan Wolpe in Conversation with Eric Salzman,”
The Musical Quarterly 83/3 (1999): 406–7.
15
Austin Clarkson, “‘The Fantasy Can Be Critically Examined’: Composition and Theory in the
Thought of Stefan Wolpe,” in Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past, ed. Christopher Hatch and
David W. Bernstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 507.
362 Straus
generation of American-born composers (especially Perle, Babbitt, and Ben Weber)

assured an impressive quantity and quality of twelve-tone activity in the United
States throughout the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. The contin-
uous tradition of twelve-tone composition, stretching from Weiss’s return in 1927
to the outpouring of twelve-tone activity in the 1950s and 1960s stands in marked
contrast to the situation in Europe, where the loss of many leading composers
together with the severe impact of the war created the conditions for a more radical
break with the past.
Myth No. 2: The Myth of Integral Serialism

The myth of integral serialism maintains that in the postwar period, American
twelve-tone composers, like their European counterparts, sought ways of serializing
musical domains other than pitch.
[The serialists] adopted and extended Schoenberg’s concept of the tone row to all musical
parameters. . . . Postwar followers of Schoenberg applied serial technique to rhythm, dy-
namics, and even timbres as well as pitch, often using complex, advanced mathematical
procedures. The movement toward total serialism, as it was known, occurred on both sides
of the Atlantic.16
The Integral Serialism of the Fifties could hardly last forever, though at the time it seemed
to have qualities of permanence and durability which were beyond question. . . . Yet well
within a decade, in Europe at least, the system had already fallen into decline, and though
its structures may still be used today, they have long ceased to be the mainstream technique
they once were. . . . It would seem that in the U.S.A., however, under the influence of Milton
Babbitt, integral serialism continues to flourish, in the East Coast universities and with
composers of the middle generation.17
As with the myth of serial origins, the myth of integral serialism results from an
erroneous conflation of the European and American experiences. Most American
twelve-tone composers during the 1950s and 1960s and beyond, although they
were often interested in exploring new rhythmic possibilities (as were many of their
non-twelve-tone counterparts), have shown little interest in serialization of rhythm
in any meaningful sense.
In systematically serializing rhythm, Babbitt is the exception, not the rule. In
his early work (dating from late 1940s and 1950s), Babbitt used “duration rows”
to shape the rhythmic domain. Typically, Babbitt assigned numbers to the pitch
classes of his series (counted in semitones of distance from the first note of the
series) and then realized those numbers as durations (measured in any convenient
rhythmic unit). Later, beginning around 1960, Babbitt found what he considered
a more profound analogy between pitch and rhythm in his “time-point system.”18
16
Broyles, Mavericks, 155.
17
Reginald Smith Brindle, The New Music: The Avant-Garde since 1945, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987), 52.
18
As Andrew Mead explains: “The elements of time point rows are themselves not durations but
locations with the modulus [i.e. the implied measure]. Therefore, the resulting pattern of durations
is a set of intervals between locations, just like the interval pattern of a pitch class row.” See Andrew
Mead, The Music of Milton Babbitt (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 46.
With both duration rows and time-point rows, Babbitt wanted to project the same
musical ideas simultaneously in the pitch and rhythmic domains. This approach
differs sharply from the Darmstadt procedure of serializing the different musi-
cal domains separately, by creating one row for the pitches and another for the
rhythms.19
Babbitt realized early on that pitch and rhythm were uniquely susceptible to
structuring and that other musical dimensions could be used to assist in projecting
pitch structures and rhythmic structures. I am not aware of any attempt by any
American twelve-tone composer to serialize dynamics, timbre, or any other musical
dimension. In rejecting the desirability or even the possibility of European-style
“integral serialism,” Mel Powell observed:
The first step was simply to apply to the other dimensions, for example, twelve dura-
tional values, twelve dynamic levels, etc. Of course the underlying absurdity was soon
discovered by everyone. In my own case it was a very simple matter of consulting a lo-
gician friend of mine who pointed out that the idea of correlating a finite set, which is
defined by octave equivalence, with an infinite set (and indeed with a set which did not
even have discrete “objective” gradations, such as dynamics) was not the swiftest thinking
in town.20
American composers have generally not been interested in European-style inte-

gral serialism or in the structuring of dynamics, articulation, or timbre. Even with
regard to rhythm, which is in principle more susceptible to structuring, American
composers other than Babbitt have shown little interest.21
Historians of postwar American music are right to pay considerable attention
to Babbitt: his music is a remarkable achievement and, together with his teaching
and writing, has given him well-deserved recognition and influence. But Babbitt
should not be considered the primary representative of twelve-tone serialism, or
even one extreme of a continuum. Rather, he is a twelve-tone world unto himself,
and concentrated study of his music reveals how distinctive and original it is. The
myth of integral serialism thus rests not only on the error of conflating the European
and American experiences but also on the error of taking Babbitt’s highly individual
practice as typical of American twelve-tone writing.
Milton Babbitt (1916– ). Babbitt’s music is generally not based on a single row and its
transformations (transpositions, inversions, retrogrades, retrograde-inversion), but rather
on slowly mutating arrays that consist of four or more row forms unfolded simultaneously.
19
This fundamental distinction between European “total serialism” and American twelve-tone
music was pointed out by Babbitt himself as early as 1955: “The alleged ‘total organization’ [of
European serialism] is achieved by applying dissimilar, essentially unrelated criteria of organization
to each of the components, criteria often derived from outside the system, so that—for example—the
rhythm is independent of and thus separable from the pitch structure.” See Milton Babbitt, “Some
Aspects of Twelve-Tone Composition,” in The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, ed. Stephen Peles
with Stephen Dembski, Andrew Mead, and Joseph N. Straus (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, [1955] 2003), 40.
20
Quoted in Reid Robins, “An Interview with Mel Powell,” The Musical Quarterly 72/4 (1986):
478.
21
Wuorinen is an important exception. He has long adapted Babbitt’s time-point system as a
way of controlling the durations of his works from their surface rhythms up to their large sectional
divisions.
364 Straus
In his first compositional period (1947–61), Babbitt uses trichordal arrays—two pairs of
combinatorially related derived series—often in conjunction with duration rows. In his
second compositional period (1964–80), he uses all-partition arrays—using all possible
partitions of an aggregate into a given number of parts—often in conjunction with time-
point arrays. In his third compositional period (1981 to the present), he uses super arrays,
in which two or more trichordal or all-partition arrays are unfolded simultaneously.22
George Perle (1915– ). In 1939, while studying with Krenek, Perle began to create a dis-
tinctive system of “twelve-tone tonality” within which he has composed ever since. In
this system, Perle creates arrays by conjoining cycles of intervals (i.e., sequential trans-
position of a note by a single interval). Harmonies are drawn from arrays as slices of
varying degrees of thickness, typically encompassing four or six notes. Within the har-
monies, pitch classes may be doubled. No particular order is specified for the notes within
a harmony or among the harmonies. This is twelve-tone music in which the aggregate is
constantly present in the background, as a by-product of the interval cycles, but rarely on the
musical surface.
Roger Sessions (1896–1985). Through the late 1940s and early 1950s, Sessions became
increasingly interested in twelve-tone approaches and the ways in which they dove-
tailed with his well-known interest in counterpoint, “the large gesture” and “the long
line,” structural depth, and motivic coherence.23 In Sessions’s serial music, encompass-
ing nearly everything he wrote beginning with the Violin Sonata (1953), the series often
functions as a deep source of motivic and intervallic relations rather than as a literal
theme—sometimes the series is easily traced on the surface of the music; other times it
recedes underground.
Aaron Copland (1900–90). Four of Copland’s late works can be considered twelve-tone—
the Piano Quartet (1950), the Piano Fantasy (1957), Connotations (1962), and Inscape
(1967). In varying ways, these works project what Copland called a “freely interpreted
tonalism.”24 That is, Copland’s twelve-tone approach permitted him to synthesize the ex-
tended harmonic possibilities of aggregate-based music with a persistent interest in tradi-
tional tonal devices and sonorities.
Myth No. 3: The Myth of Serial Tyranny

The myth of serial tyranny maintains that serial composition dominated the Amer-
ican art music scene during the 1950s and 1960s, and that twelve-tone composers
were more likely than others to secure academic positions, receive grants and awards,
and to have their music published, performed, recorded, and reviewed.25
In July of 1921, after crafting his first twelve-tone row, Schoenberg had written, “Today
I have discovered something which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the
next hundred years.” By the late 1950s, Schoenberg’s claim had come to seem prophetic,
for from that point twelve-tone music dominated what was “acceptably modernistic” in
American music for a full quarter-century. America’s neoclassic movement, the wing that
22
This division into periods follows Mead, The Music of Milton Babbitt.
23
Andrew Imbrie, “Roger Sessions: In Honor of His Sixty-fifth Birthday,” Perspectives of New
Music 1/1 (Autumn 1962), 124.
24
Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland Since 1943 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 242.
25
For a general discussion of this myth, including relevant empirical data, see Joseph N. Straus,
“The Myth of Serial ‘Tyranny’ in the 1950s and 1960s,” The Musical Quarterly 83/3 (Autumn 1999):
301–43.
followed Stravinsky rather than Schoenberg, had a short-lived success, its achievements all
but obliterated by the hegemony of twelve-tone music after 1955.26
The serialists were fascists, and with the appointment of Boulez to the post as conductor of
the New York Philharmonic [in 1971], we knew it was all over for composers of my style.27
Forty years ago [i.e., 1964] the serialists held the greatest intimidating force in the small world
of modern composition; then there was a terrific rebellion against many of its assumptions—
I was certainly part of that rebellion—and now it is OK to attack all serialists, indeed all the
new music of the period roughly between 1950 and 1975.28
[In 1982, I was] locked in a battle with what I came to call “the complicated music gang.”
These, of course, were the “uptown” guys, the atonal composers—Babbitt, Charles Wuori-
nen, and the rest—who dominated contemporary classical music in New York, and influ-
enced a good share of the funding, commissions, and faculty appointments that composers
might get, anywhere in America.29
Yet no matter what the statistics, it is hard to deny a prevailing mood in the 1950s, ’60s,
and ’70s. Whether fact or fantasy, a sense that serialists somehow had spread a reign of
terror pervaded the compositional world, and practically all young composers and many
established ones felt almost helpless in the grip of a serial tyranny. Testimony is overwhelming
that composers who did not wish to write serial music felt intimidated and thwarted in their
careers, be it positions in academia, prizes, or performances. As a consequence almost every
major composer who came of age from the late 1950s to the ’70s felt compelled to at least
attempt serialism, regardless of leanings and preferences.30
Empirical study establishes that there was, in fact, no serial tyranny in the 1950s
and 1960s.31 Jobs, grants, awards, publications, performances, recordings, and
reviews went to twelve-tone composers roughly in proportion to their numbers
within the larger population of composers (around 15%). Even if twelve-tone
composers and free atonal composers are conflated into a single category, their
post-tonal orientation is represented a distinct minority of the time in the economy
of postwar American music. The claim that twelve-tone composers, even if not
actually dominant, were nonetheless perceived to be dominant during the 1950s
and 1960s is also false. Authoritative descriptions of contemporary music in that
period, offered by historians, journalists, and the composers themselves, generally
26
Kyle Gann, American Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer Books, 1997), 104.
For Gann, the twelve-tone hegemony extends from 1955 to 1980.
27
Robert Starer, interview with Michael Broyles, 14 July 1999, cited in Broyles, Mavericks, 170.
There is an obvious irony here, in that Boulez never performed twelve-tone music by any American
composer, and very little music by any American composer. Furthermore, it is worth noticing that
Starer places the high point of serial ascendancy in 1971, after the end point identified by many other
commentators.
28
William Bolcom, “The End of the Mannerist Century,” in The Pleasure of Modernist Music:
Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology, ed. Arved Ashby (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester
Press, [1966] 2004), 47.
29
Greg Sandow, “A Fine Analysis,” in Ashby, The Pleasure of Modernist Music, 54. Sandow identifies
the high point of twelve-tone domination in 1982, whereas Bolcom asserts that it was over by 1975.
30
Broyles, Mavericks, 171. Broyles concedes that there was no serial tyranny in reality, but asserts
that it existed as a widespread perception. As I argue below, there are no contemporary claims of serial
tyranny, only retrospective ones. Serial tyranny neither existed nor was perceived to exist.
31
This is the central contention of Straus, “The Myth of Serial ‘Tyranny.’ ”
366 Straus
agree that twelve-tone composition was only one option among many, and by no
means a dominant one.32
In the United States, right now, it would be tragic if there were no group to continue to
present both here and abroad the most advanced and competent works. This is a weak and
powerless group in relation to American society, but many of our best composers, such as
Sessions, Ives, Varèse, Kahn, and Leon Kirchner, belong to it.33 (1955)
Twenty years ago the small handful of courageous composers who cultivated Arnold Schoen-
berg’s “method of composing with twelve tones” would certainly have found their proper
place among the very advanced guard of the Experimentalists. Today, thirty years after
Schoenberg completed his first compositions systematically employing the twelve-tone
technique, the latter may be said to have definitely outgrown the stage of laboratory ex-
perimentation and to have become one of the main trends of musical composition in the
twentieth century.34 (1955)
The eternal quarrel between what is “esoteric” and what “popular” has evolved into a quite
urbane, almost friendly argument between diatonicism and chromaticism, the tonalists and
the atonalists, or with overtones resounding from a very recent past, between neoclassicism
and the twelve-tone music. We are probably in a period of calm before new storms.35 (1956)
How will the Nineteen Fifties shape up in music history? . . . In composition the most
pervasive current flowed toward consolidation. . . . Increasingly composers sought to find
individual ways to adapt serial techniques to their own style. . . . While the consolidators
were at work, the experimenters were busier than ever. They took off in various directions,
notably into the field of electronics. . . . The pursuit of more traditional composing methods
continued.36 (1959)
Through the whole decade of the 1950s, I can find not one single published account
of serial or twelve-tone domination.
Beginning around 1962, contemporary accounts do describe a twelve-tone dom-
ination, but only retrospectively, as something that was true during the 1950s but
is true no longer. That is, serial tyranny went directly from being unperceived to
32
Peter Davis writes: “In 1958 New York’s classical music circle was still dominated by established
composers, critics and tastemakers who had their own conservative agenda to promote. It was a
powerful bloc, deeply hostile to the two opposing progressive musical tendencies that were just begin-
ning to gather momentum in the 1960s: astringent 12-tone serial orthodoxy, as it was being codified
and practiced in uptown academic circles, and the freewheeling pop-rock-Minimalist movement
that had started to thrive downtown in Greenwich Village.” See Peter G. Davis, “The Prizewinning
Opera Time Forgot,” New York Times, 4 November 2007. Although Davis’s characterization of twelve-
tone serialism as an orthodoxy is inaccurate (see discussion below) and his chronology adds to the
confusion (he imagines that serialism was “just beginning to gather momentum in the 1960s,” a time
when some say serialism was at its height or had already become passé), his description of the world
of contemporary American music as still under the control of a conservative musical establishment is
reasonably accurate.
33
Elliott Carter, “The Agony of Modern Music in America,” in Elliott Carter: Collected Essays and
Lectures, 1937–1995, ed. Jonathan Bernard (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, [1955]
1997), 56. Carter points to the marginal status of “advanced” works, a category that presumably
includes both twelve-tone and atonal composition.
34
Gilbert Chase, America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955),
597. Note that Chase identifies the twelve-tone approach as “one of the main trends,” not as dominant.
35
Roger Sessions, Reflections on the Music Life in the United States (New York: Merlin Press, 1956),
178–79.
36
Howard Taubman, “Exit the Fifties: A Synthesis of Ideas Marked the Decade,” New York Times,
13 December 1959.
being over, and contemporary accounts of the musical scene in the 1960s continue
to emphasize a plurality of compositional styles.
Up to only the last five years or so, an aggressive type of dissonant modernism was very much
the style, whether Schoenbergian dodecaphony or Milhaudian polytonality. The twelve-tone
school was by far the most important, and as time goes on, it seems more and more certain
that it was a withering influence. . . . There also are indications that the twelve-tone hold,
especially the Webern craze, has spent its force.37 (1962)
Right now the youngsters are experimenting like mad. Orthodox serialism is out. Style
rather than content is the rage, the musical equivalents of op and pop. Tonality is not as
dead as it seems; and, anyway, the composers who abjure tonality are but a tiny percentage
of living composers.38 (1965)
In America there was little continuity between the 19th-century German tradition and the
various classicisms of the 1920s and ’30s, but these latter were spreading and flourishing
vigorously in the 1950s and ’60s.39 (1966)
The same pattern—a serial tyranny described as part of the past, a plurality of
styles observed in the present—continues through the last quarter of the twentieth
century and right up to the present. As the myth of serial tyranny hardens into
conventional wisdom, observers all agree that twelve-tone composers dominated
the musical scene at one time, but there is no agreement at all on precisely when
that domination began and when it ended.
In the 1950s and 1960s, although twelve-tone composition was not a dominant
force or perceived to be a dominant force, it was certainly a vigorous presence.
There are a number of reasons why twelve-tone composition, previously the domain
primarily of the fringe ultra-modern composers and a small group of European
émigrés, should enter the compositional mainstream in the postwar United States,
all of which have been suggested in previous literature on the subject. The reasons
would certainly include the persistent cultural prestige of Europe and the European
musical tradition, including its most recent developments; the star power of major
twelve-tone composers like Stravinsky, Copland, and Sessions; the prestige of science
in the postwar United States, which may to some extent have enhanced the appeal
of a compositional method that appeared scientific and rational; cold war politics
(twelve-tone music appeared to some to be a way of countering Soviet-style Socialist
Realism); intrinsic appeal (the twelve-tone approach offered composers a way of
thinking systematically about the twelve tones); and the capricious and therefore
mysterious workings of fashion.
An accurate and nuanced account of twelve-tone composition in the 1950s,
1960s, and beyond must account for the upsurge in interest without succumbing to
37
Harold Schonberg, “Where Are They? U.S. Has Much Compositional Activity, but Young
Generation Lacks Power,” New York Times, 17 January 1962. For Schonberg, the period of serial
domination, never directly observed in the first place, is over by 1962.
38
Harold Schonberg, “Future of the Symphony,” New York Times, 24 October 1965. Schonberg
maintains that the large majority of American composers in 1965 had a tonal orientation.
39
William W. Austin, Music in the 20th Century: From Debussy Through Stravinsky (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1966), 436. Austin calls attention to the vigorous flourishing of musical neoclassicism
through the mid-1960s, a time when Kyle Gann claims it had been “obliterated by the hegemony of
twelve-tone music”—see above.
368 Straus
mythmaking and the overheated language that has accompanied it. In the postwar
United States, a large number of composers, including those widely acknowledged
as preeminent, wrote a wide variety of twelve-tone musical styles. The musical scene
was thus remarkably diverse, both among the different available approaches and
within them. But through it all, twelve-tone serialism remained only one option
among many.
George Rochberg (1918–2005). Rochberg is probably best known today for his aban-
donment and critique of twelve-tone music; in some ways, Rochberg’s move away from
twelve-tone composition had an impact comparable to Stravinsky’s and Copland’s move
towards it: a landmark in a long-standing cultural discussion. However, for roughly ten
years, from the Twelve Bagatelles for Piano (1952) to the String Quartet no. 2 (completed in
1961), Rochberg was a committed composer of vibrant and distinctive twelve-tone music.
Most characteristically, Rochberg brought to the serial enterprise his own ideas about the
“spatialization” of music: the series (or a group of series forms) is used to articulate a self-
contained musical shape, which is positioned with respect to other self-contained shapes in
the manner of a mobile or a collage.40
Ross Lee Finney (1906–97). Finney became a twelve-tone composer in the early 1950s and
walked the serial road in one way or another for the remainder of his long career. One of
the most distinctive features of Finney’s twelve-tone music is its persistent sense of tonal
center: “Now my music always was and still is tonal. Even my twelve-tone music is tonal.” 41
Finney used the term “complementarity” to refer to the integration of twelve-tone and
tonal approaches: the local successions would be governed by twelve-tone relations, but the
large-scale organization would be defined by a succession of centric pitch classes, that is, of
tonal tonics.
Ursula Mamlok (1928– ). Mamlok has been a twelve-tone composer since her studies with
Wolpe and Shapey in the early 1960s: “I’m very comfortable writing 12-tone music but
you will hear composers say, ‘That’s passé.’ That’s the same as saying the C Major scale is
passé—you can’t go by that, you have to have your own language.”42 Mamlok’s twelve-tone
language has often involved either taking unusual paths through the familiar twelve-by-
twelve matrix (including spiraling inward in narrowing concentric squares) or in devising
original charts and arrays involving multiple series forms or hexachords alone. In either
case, her twelve-tone music is rich in motivic repetition and cross-reference.
Roque Cordero (1917– ). Born in Panama and immersed in Panamanian folk music,
Cordero spent most of his professional life in the United States. He began to compose
twelve-tone music in the mid-1940s, while studying with Krenek. His twelve-tone style is
largely contrapuntal with constant doubling, repetition, and imitation between the parts:
“I had to integrate technical elements from Europe which I learned from Ernst Krenek.
. . . I am not necessarily quoting from the Panamanian folk song because I have very seldom
quoted directly from Panamanian folk song, but I do use rhythmic elements and some
melodic design that can be found there without being any one in particular.”43
40
George Rochberg, “The New Image of Music,” in The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer’s View
of Twentieth-Century Music, ed. William Bolcom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, [1963]
1984), 16–28.
41
Quoted in Susan Hayes Hitchens, Ross Lee Finney: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1996), 16–17. Finney had been one of Alban Berg’s few American students, and his
ideas about potentional intersections of the twelve-tone method with traditional tonality may have
had their origins in Berg.
42
Ursula Mamlok, liner notes for American Masters: Ursula Mamlok, CRI CD 891, 2002.
43
Quoted in Thomas Carl Townsend, “A Conversation with Roque Cordero,” LAMúsiCa (Latin
American Music Center Newsletter) 2/4 (May 1999): 5.
Myth No. 4: The Myth of Serial Demise

The myth of serial demise holds that at some point (writers disagree about the
actual date), either the mythical serial tyranny ended or composers simply stopped
composing twelve-tone music altogether.
I have written elsewhere that I expected the latter half of this century to witness the
consolidation of our century’s innovations into an amalgamated twentieth-century style. . . .
Everybody successful or establishment-minded writes music now, diatonic or chromatic,
with a thickish overlay of dissonance, and since 1950 with a decreasing dependence on serial
continuities.44
The discovery and dissemination of the music of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg created
the predominant musical language of the 1950s. . . . Many composers, both old and young,
experienced or tyros, turned to serial composition in the 1950s. . . . In spite of its popularity
and the feeling held by many that dodecaphony would be a prevailing idiom for many
decades, it did not retain its importance in the following years. In an interview reported by
the New York Times on December 6, 1964, Igor Stravinsky declared that “Card-carrying
12-toners are practically extinct.”45
Though preeminent until the 1960s, twelve-tone music has since disappeared—or, perhaps,
been banished—from the musical scene.46
[A] backlash against Serialism arose in the 1970s, and there was soon a profusion of Min-
imalists and neo-Romantics. Amid this new post-modernist diversity, Serialism faded in
power and prestige.47
[T]he seeming breakdown of the total serialist order in the past few years [i.e., the late
1970s], and of the Northeastern oligarchy that propagated that hegemony in his country.48
There is a general consensus that the Uptown scene began to lose steam in the mid-1980s
with the defection of many younger composers from any allegiance to 12-tone technique.49
During the 1970’s, . . . [s]erialism, extreme dissonance, and mathematically derived “spots
on the page” had become so entrenched that it seemed there was no turning back. But a
backlash did come, and by 1983 the vogue for big tonal pieces had become so pervasive
that the New York Philharmonic was able to present a series of concerts of music by John
Harbison, David Del Tredici, Bernard Rands, John Adams and others under the provocative
title “A New Romanticism?”50
Yet Schoenberg’s serial atonality soon became a trans-Atlantic orthodoxy, which has only
recently [i.e., the 1990s] collapsed.51
44
Virgil Thomson, American Music Since 1910 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), 89.
Note that Thomson dates the waning of serialism to 1950. In this and the subsequent quotations, the
italics are added.
45
Peter S. Hansen, An Introduction to Twentieth Century Music, 3rd edn. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon,
1971), 346, 353, 354.
46
Diana Raffman, “Is Twelve-Tone Music Artistically Defective?” Midwest Studies in Philosophy
27/1 (2003): 71.
47
Robert K. Schwarz, “In Contemporary Music, A House Still Divided,” New York Times, 3 August
1977.
48
John Rockwell, “Signs of Vitality in New Music,” New York Times, 10 February 1980.
49
Kyle Gann, Music Downtown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 3.
50
Paul Horsley, “For an Early Post-Modernist [i.e., George Rochberg], A Day of Overdue Vindi-
cation,” New York Times, 12 July 1998.
51
Dana Gioia, “Let’s Review,” New York Times Book Review, 24 January 1999.
370 Straus
The experience to which [Elliott] Carter’s music gives authoritative access is that of belonging
to a self-congratulating coterie, lately [i.e., the 1990s] beside itself with rage at its loss of
power to tyrannize the classical music community.52
Despite the myth, important and engaging serial music has continued to be written
in the United States by major composers up to the present day. I propose that
the history of American twelve-tone music spans three overlapping phases in a
continuous and still living tradition. The first phase (from the mid-1920s to the
mid-1940s) belongs to the ultra-modern composers and the European émigré
composers, working to some degree in mutual awareness and personal contact.
The second phase (from the mid-1940s to the late 1970s) embraces a full range of
twelve-tone activity as a significant number of older composers began to explore
the approach while an even larger group of younger composers emerged within the
twelve-tone tradition. Despite the myth of serial demise, there has been a significant
third phase of US twelve-tone composition, spanning from roughly 1980 to the
present.
In 1981, Milton Babbitt arrived at what Andrew Mead calls his “Grand Synthesis”
and began composing with “superarrays.”53 This initiated a long period of sustained
compositional activity that continues to the present moment. Since 1981, Babbitt
has written more music, received more prestigious awards, and had more perfor-
mances from major ensembles and soloists than he ever did during the 1950s and
1960s. In 1980, with Night Fantasies, Elliott Carter, who had long been concerned
with the systematic partitioning of the twelve-note aggregate, began composing
with twelve-tone series, but ordered in space rather than time—the series is now a
chord rather than a melody.54 Many of his works since 1980 involve not just one
resulting twelve-note chord, but extended successions of such chords.
After a period of composing a rather free kind of twelve-tone music, in which a
series might provide a point of departure rather than a persistent thematic presence,
Ralph Shapey began in 1981 to rely on a special kind of twelve-tone array he
called “The Mother Lode,” and virtually all of his subsequent works are based
on it.55 For Charles Wuorinen, the early 1980s marked both a reorientation of
his twelve-tone style towards a somewhat simplified musical surface and more
transparent organization around audible pitch centers as well as the composition
of an impressive group of large-scale orchestral compositions. During the previous
decade, Perle had significantly expanded his system of “twelve-tone tonality,” and
52
Richard Taruskin, letter to the editor, New York Times, 27 July 1997.
53
Mead, The Music of Milton Babbitt, 204. Mead defines a “superarray” as “consisting of all-
partition or trichordal arrays assembled into larger contrapuntal networks” (37).
54
On Carter’s twelve-note chords, see Elliott Carter, Harmony Book, ed. Nicholas Hopkins and
John F. Link (New York: Carl Fischer, 2002); Andrew Mead, “Twelve-Tone Composition and the
Music of Elliott Carter,” in Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies, ed.
Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1995):
67–102; and John Link, “The Composition of Elliott Carter’s Night Fantasies,” Sonus 14/2 (Spring
1994): 67–89.
55
The “Mother Lode” consists of six lines (a series, its retrograde, and four additional lines) and
twelve chords. Shapey presents and discusses it in the Preface to the score for his String Quartet
no. 9. Patrick Finley, A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Shapey (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press,
1997), provides additional discussion and analysis.
this compositional approach has sustained his compositional activity through the
subsequent decades.56 At about the same time, Gunther Schuller settled on the
twelve-tone row that he has used in all of his subsequent compositions, more than
forty of them in varying media and styles. All of these major composers found new
ways of writing twelve-tone music around 1980 and all have continued composing
twelve-tone music up to the present moment.
While these established composers were recommitting themselves to the twelve-
tone enterprise, a younger generation of twelve-tone composers came to maturity.
Joseph Schwantner (b. 1943) received the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for the twelve-tone
Aftertones of Infinity, and he has continued to compose aggregate-based music. The
twelve-tone Concerto for Piano (1980) of Peter Lieberson (b. 1946) was premiered
by Peter Serkin and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1983; Lieberson, too,
has continued to write his own version of twelve-tone music since. Many other
twelve-tone composers came of age in the 1970s and ’80s and have continued
to write twelve-tone music at least until recent years, including Jonathan Dawe,
Louis Karchin, Andrew Mead, Robert Morris, Jeff Nichols, David Smalley, Judd
Danby, and Dan Welcher. By 1980, twelve-tone serialism was no longer considered
fashionable, but major American composers, joined by a small but vigorous group
from a rising generation of American composers, were rededicating themselves to
the enterprise and discovering new compositional possibilities within it.
It would be tempting to say that the myth of serial demise derives from an
erroneous conflation of the American and European experiences. The conventional
wisdom is that the European avant-garde composers associated with Darmstadt
practiced their radical brand of integral serialism for only a few years and then
turned elsewhere (mostly to indeterminacy and electronic media). Many have
assumed that the American experience involved a similar flare-up and burn-out,
which is not at all the case. The most recent scholarship, however, shows that in
Europe, as in the United States, serial demise is a myth. Indeed, the Darmstadt
composers and other members of the European postwar avant-garde (including
Boulez, Henze, Maderna, Berio, and Nono) continued to write twelve-tone serial
music of one kind or another well beyond 1960, indeed through the 1970s, 1980s,
and beyond.57
Twelve-tone music was certainly out of fashion by around 1980. But to ignore
the past thirty years of twelve-tone music by Babbitt, Carter, Wuorinen, Shapey,
56
Perle’s compositional treatise,
.. Twelve-Tone Tonality, was published in 1977.
57
On Henze, see Zafer Ozgen, “Form, Genre, and Musical Language in Hans Werner Henze’s
Operas from 1955 to 1965” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2008). On Maderna, see
Christoph Neidhöfer, “Bruno Maderna’s Serial Arrays,” Music Theory Online 13/1 (March 2007). On
Messiaen, see Vincent Benitez, “Understanding Messiaen’s Connection to Serialism: Theological Time
and Its Musical Expression Through Number in His Later Works,” unpublished paper. On Nono, see
Paulo de Assis, Luigi Nonos Wende: zwischen Como una ola fuerza y luz und sofferte onde serene
(Hofheim: Wolke, 2006). On Berio, see Irna Priore, “Vestiges of 12-Tone Practice in Berio’s Sequenza
for Solo Flute,” in Berio’s Sequenzas: Essays on Composition, Performance, Analysis and Aesthetics, ed.
Janet Halfyard, 189–206 (Birmingham, UK: Ashgate Academic Publishers, 2007). On Boulez, see
Jonathan Goldman, “Exploding/Fixed: Form as Opposition in the Writings and Later Works of Pierre
Boulez” (Ph.D. diss., University of Montreal, 2006); and Catherine Losada, “Isography and Structure
in the Music of Boulez,” Journal of Mathematics and Music (forthcoming).
372 Straus
Martino, and very many others is to falsify the history of postwar American music.
Virtually every historical account of postwar American music discusses twelve-tone
and serial music as a phenomenon unique to the 1950s and 1960s.58 This approach
makes for a streamlined narrative but for poor history.
Charles Wuorinen (1938– ). One of the most distinctive features of Wuorinen’s approach
to twelve-tone composition is what he calls a “time-point system.”59 This system seeks
an integration of pitch and rhythm by basing both on the same series. Furthermore, it
seeks an integration of the rhythmic organization of a work, from its immediate surface
rhythms, through its phrases, up through the large formal sections. Wuorinen’s multi-
level conception of the serial organization brings in its wake a strong sense of orientation
towards specific pitches, and this interest in pitch centricity is a persistent feature of all of
Wuorinen’s music.
Donald Martino (1931–2005). In Martino’s conception, each section of a piece will have
its own distinctive twelve-tone design, with defining intervals, trichords, tetrachords, hex-
achords, and twelve-tone series. The sections can then be concatenated as links in a larger
chain, with each link simultaneously responsive to the previous links and predictive of
future ones: “It wasn’t until three years later, in my Piano Fantasy of 1958 that I stumbled
for the first time upon a sort of useful procedure for me, which had to do with combining a
set with one of its transformations to produce another set.”60 In Martino’s music, there may
be many different series, and these need not be explicit on the musical surface. Rather than
guaranteeing unity, the rows provide a guide through a universe of relationships within the
aggregate of twelve pitch classes.61
Ralph Shapey (1921–2002). Shapey became a twelve-tone composer in the late 1950s,
but both his aesthetic orientation and compositional practice owe more to Varèse, whose
music he championed as a conductor, and to Wolpe, with whom he studied, than to
Schoenberg. Shapey rejects Schoenbergian developing variation in favor of a music based
on static sonorous objects deployed in musical space: “In my music, the initial space-time
image generates through expansion of itself all textures and a structural totality. Through
permutation of this image I continue, rather than destroy, its state of being. I work with
the concept of ‘it is’ instead of the traditional ‘it becomes.’ . . . The ‘image’ must create and
sustain the unforgettable moment.”62 Shapey began in 1981 to rely on a special kind of
twelve-tone array he called “The Mother Lode,” which is precisely the kind of “image” he
has in mind—a structure that can “create and sustain” contrasting musical moments.
58
Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2007), the most recent history available to me at this writing, is typical in this regard. Its final
mention of serialism, twelve-tone writing, or of any of the composers discussed in the present article,
comes in a discussion of Babbitt’s music and writing from the late 1950s.
59
Wuorinen’s compositional approach is described in detail in his treatise, Simple Composition
(New York: C. F. Peters, 1979). According to Jeffrey Kresky, “Wuorinen flatly states that his underlying
structural and procedural concerns remain precisely the same as they have been over a considerably
long stretch of his output: namely the establishment of a piece-long general structure involving both
in pitch and in time a single twelve-tone set that influences, again in pitch and in time, and in ways
that vary from piece to piece and certainly vary from classical twelve-tone practice, the course and
detail of the piece at all levels.” See Kresky, “The Recent Music of Charles Wuorinen,” Perspectives of
New Music 25/1–2 (1987): 415.
60
Quoted in James Boros, “A Conversation with Donald Martino,” Perspectives of New Music 29/2
(Summer 1991): 221–22.
61
Mapping this universe is the theoretical project of Donald Martino, “The Source Set and Its
Aggregate Formations,” Journal of Music Theory 5/2 (Winter 1961): 224–73.
62
Ralph Shapey, “Some Basic Concepts about my Work,” Shapey Collection, University of
Chicago, Regenstein Library, 29 November 1960.
Robert Morris (1943– ). One of Robert Morris’s most productive concepts is that of
“compositional design,” which he defines as “an array of pitch-classes ready to be realized
as music. . . . Such designs are not identical to or substitutes for ‘precompositional plans’
or sketches although they may play a part in the early planning of a composition before
one begins the first draft. Compositional designs are more akin to figured bass in Baroque
continuo parts or the chord symbols used in lead sheets in jazz, in that such notations guide
both composition and improvisation but, once mastered, do not, directly or indirectly,
influence stylistic and personal choice.”63
Joseph Schwantner (1943– ). In Joseph Schwantner’s twelve-tone music, the series is more a
point of departure than a thematic presence on the musical surface. He uses it as a source of
intervallic and motivic materials. In his works from the 1970s, he uses partitioning schemes
to derive new series forms, which are then treated in the same improvisatory manner
as the original one. More recently, he has incorporated more tonal references (including
tonal centers) and more emphasis on colorful harmonic stasis and overt repetition, while
maintaining a structural interest in the twelve pitch-class aggregate.64
Myth No. 5: The Myth of the Academic Serialist

The myth of the academic serialist maintains that serialism was bred in the
university, with its emphasis on rational inquiry, that serial composers have
dominated the university, and that serial composers did not fare well outside
the university.
Lacking a concert audience, Serialism found a home in the academic world. At the conser-
vatories, composers had a haven where they could teach the strict rules of Serialism, write
bristling works to be played by ensembles connected with the school . . . and wait for the
day when the rest of the world would catch up.65
The serialists were particularly adept at securing support from [foundations], not the
least because they also found an even more powerful and viable base of patronage. They
discovered academia and bent it to their purposes. The rational, scientific orientation of
the serialist composer easily overcame any vestigial uneasiness other academics might have
about the legitimacy of the composer in a university setting. This orientation also allowed
the composer to speak the language of foundation grants, and a natural alignment soon
developed among the composer, the foundations, and universities. The composer found a
secure place and a power that he never before had. Through his position in academia, he
could go after the riches of the foundations, while at the same time his position in academia
certified him as an expert adviser to the foundations themselves. He could not only secure
money but have significant impact on how that money was distributed. Never before had
the composer had so much control over his own destiny. Or, more accurately, never before
had a handful of composers so much power over what was written.66
Serialism’s most publicly aggressive proponents, early and late, presented and still present
it as the only true faith. As such, they have proclaimed an orthodox cultural church,
with its hierarchy, gospels, beliefs and anathemas. After the end of World War II, it very
63
Robert Morris, Composition with Pitch-Classes: A Theory of Compositional Design (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1987), xi, 3–4.
64
See Cynthia Folio, “The Synthesis of Traditional and Contemporary Elements in Joseph
Schwantner’s Sparrows,” Perspectives of New Music 24/1 (Autumn–Winter 1985): 184–96.
65
John Schaefer, New Sounds: A Listener’s Guide to New Music (New York: Harper & Row, 1987),
xiv.
66
374 Straus
quickly captured and dominated American academic circles, which it monstrously and
bluntly politicized.67
Nowadays, a revisionist campaign is under way arguing that the “great split” [between
twelve-tone and tonal composers] was hugely overstated. The 12-tone commando squad
never commanded anything during the fractious, much maligned 1960s, the line goes.
True, the squad was uninterested in composers writing tonal music, but it did not condemn
them, and certainly never controlled them. Don’t you believe it. I was there, studying
music at Yale, and the Serialists ran the place, as well as other composition departments
at major universities. They made the appointments, granted the tenure, recruited the
composition students.68
At first, universities put up a horrified resistance to twelve-tone technique, calling it mathe-
matics rather than music. But, once inside the door, the twelve-tone composers found their
work so well-suited for classroom explication that the university became their haven.69
In fact, twelve-tone serialism in the United States originated outside the academy
and has flourished outside it. Twelve-tone composers were no more likely than
other composers to find a creative home in the university, and the university was
no more disposed to welcome them than composers of other orientations. Indeed,
twelve-tone composers often found the university notably inhospitable.
Twelve-tone composition in the United States has its roots outside of the uni-
versity, in the prewar activities of the ultra-modern composers. When the émigrés
began streaming in from Europe, some found at least temporary homes in American
college and universities (Schoenberg at the University of California at Los Angeles
and the University of Southern California, Krenek at Vassar College and Hamline
University), but most (like Wolpe and Stravinsky) did not. And even those who did
can hardly be said to have been nurtured there.
When twelve-tone composition began to blossom in this country in the 1950s
and 1960s—what I have called the second wave of twelve-tone music in the US—a
significant amount of activity did take place within the university, as part of a
large-scale trend that affected composers of all orientations, but many of the most
important twelve-tone composers, then and now, never had any long-standing
university affiliation. During that period, the two most prominent composers in
the US who wrote twelve-tone music were probably Stravinsky and Copland. Other
composers of twelve-tone music active in the period, including Riegger and Weber,
similarly avoided any academic connection. Leonard Rosenman, a former student
of Schoenberg’s, became a prominent Hollywood composer and wrote the first
twelve-tone film score (The Cobweb, dir. Vincente Minelli, 1955). More recently,
in what I am calling the third serial wave, Carter and Lieberson have had only
fleeting university connections. Furthermore, a significant number of twelve-tone
composers who have earned a living by teaching have done so in the conservatory
rather than the university—I am thinking, for example, of Gunther Schuller (New
England Conservatory) and Ursula Mamlok (Manhattan School of Music). All of
67
George Rochberg, quoted in K. Robert Schwarz, “In Contemporary Music, a House Still Di-
vided,” New York Times, 3 August 1997.
68
Anthony Tommasini, “When Bernstein Saw the Future,” New York Times, 22 July 1998.
69
Gann, American Music, 104.
these composers are non-academic serialists. Their number and their prominence
suggest strongly that one could be (and still can be) a serial composer without
being a university composer. Despite claims that serial composers dominated the
academy during the 1950s and 1960s, a simple statistical check shows that at
no time did serial composers alone or even serial composers together with atonal
composers constitute a majority of composers in academia. Indeed, serial composers
were probably no more than roughly one-fifth of active university composers at
any time.70
The myth of the academic serialist is an offshoot of the reality of the academic
composer. In the postwar period in America, the university became the principal
patron of the art music tradition, a phenomenon that has been widely observed.71
But it by no means follows that serial composers were more likely to enter the
university than composers with other orientations, provided the music was in the
classical mainstream. During the 1950s and 1960s, that mainstream included more
serial composers than ever before, but it also encompassed a broad range of tonally
oriented styles. Since that period, with the waning of critical interest in twelve-tone
music, the university has remained the principal patron of non-commercial music
in the classical tradition, encompassing a wide variety of styles. There is nothing
intrinsically academic about serialism, and nothing especially serial about academic
music departments, then or now.
Twelve-tone composers, like all kinds of composers, entered the university during
and after World War II, but the notion that they found life there particularly
congenial is belied by the experiences of many. Ernst Krenek, for example, had
secured a position at Vassar College in 1939, but was fired in 1942 because, in
the words of George Sherman Dickinson, the chair of the music department,
“the specialized aspect of contemporary music which you so enthusiastically and
forcibly represent has little place in the curriculum of an undergraduate college
such as Vassar.”72 The dismissal of Martino from Yale in 1966 and Wuorinen from
Columbia in 1971, at the height of the presumptive “serial tyranny,” suggests that
Dickinson’s attitude may have been more widespread, and more powerfully in
control, than has been widely acknowledged. Babbitt has described the university
as “our last hope, our only hope, and ergo our best hope,”73 but has frequently
found that hope to be far from fully realized.74
70
See Straus, “The Myth of Serial ‘Tyranny.’ ”
71
William Brooks, “The Americas, 1945–70,” in Modern Times: From World War I to the Present,
ed. Robert P. Morgan (London: Macmillan, 1993), 315: “When war came, European music was
thus well-ensconced in the USA. Academic departments were staffed largely by European-trained
composers. . . . From the 1950s to the present, those wishing to extend the fabric of European music
have found friendly homes in American universities. In the USA and Latin America, indeed, there
were few alternatives to university positions.”
72
Quoted in John Stewart, Ernst Krenek: the Man and His Music (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1991), 232.
73
Milton Babbitt, “The Unlikely Survival of Serious Music,” in Words about Music, ed. Stephen
Dembski and Joseph N. Straus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 183.
74
“To the extent to which the composer’s professional needs are not accommodated by and
in the university, and they are not with regard to publication of his music, preparation of materials,
performance, and recording (indeed, all the modes of professional communication with—at least—his
376 Straus
It has often been asserted that there was an especially good fit between twelve-
tone composers and universities that valued the rational, the scientific, and the
quantitative:
A compositional style that was (or appeared) rational, objective, and quantifiable, or at least
rooted in complex mathematical manipulation, seemed more appropriate in a university
setting than a more angst-ridden, personal emotional expressivity, or a pounding, primitive-
sounding repetitive style.75
But though universities may have liked rationality, science, and mathematics in
general, they did not necessarily value them as attributes of music or composers
of music. Indeed, the twelve-tone musical style and, even more, the technical
language that some composers used to describe it, were not notably applauded or
rewarded within the university system. Twelve-tone composers were never more
likely to get academic positions, promotions, awards and grants, or other kinds of
academic goodies than other composers.76 The academy neither encouraged them
nor rewarded them in any special way.
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971). In the early phase of his life as a serial composer, beginning
in 1952, Stravinsky composed with series, usually of fewer than twelve tones, that consisted
of diatonic material, and produced a distinctive brand of “diatonic serialism.” Beginning
in 1960, with the composition of Movements, Stravinsky began to compose with the rota-
tional arrays that characterize all of his subsequent work and represent his most distinctive
contribution to twelve-tone music. To create these arrays, Stravinsky takes four forms of a
twelve-tone series (P, I, R, and RI), divides each into its two hexachords, and then rotates
and transposes each hexachord independently in the manner of Krenek. He draws melodies
from the rows of the array and harmonies from its columns. The resulting music thus
draws its material from twelve-tone series, but presents a musical surface rich in ostinati,
doublings, and repetition of small melodic fragments.
Ben Weber (1916–79). Weber was among the first post-ultra-modern twelve-tone com-
posers in America—his Five Bagatelles, op. 2, dates from 1939. For Weber, the twelve-tone
approach provided a framework—an “available form,” in his words—for relatively free
compositional activity: “When I began to write twelve-tone music it was very unfashionable
to do it—in fact nobody knew about it—and it has become passé. I only used it as a
method of organizing my music so I could maintain my technical relationship to what I was
doing. . . . I simply invented always with material closely related in a certain sense to the way
Schoenberg composed. It’s simply an available form—that’s all.”77 Weber’s later works use a
twelve-tone series as much more a precompositional impetus than a thematic presence on
the musical surface. As his compositional style develops, the music remains highly chromatic
and aggregate-based, but without much apparent concern for serial ordering even of smaller
units, much less of all twelve tones.
Leonard Rosenman (1924– ). A student of Schoenberg, Sessions, Bloch, and Dallapiccola
between 1947 and 1952, Rosenman went on to a long and distinguished career as a film
colleagues), to that extent the composer is driven out of the university to dependency upon recording
executives, commercial publishers, and—even—journalists. . . . The trouble with the university is not
that it has protected the composer from the confusions, demands, and coercions of the ‘real world’; the
trouble is that it has not.” Milton Babbitt, “Contribution to ‘The Composer in Academia’: Reflections
on a Theme of Stravinsky” (1970), in Peles, The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, 261.
75
76
This assertion is documented in Straus, “The Myth of Serial ‘Tyranny.’ ”
77
Ben Weber, How I Took 63 Years to Commit Suicide, unpublished manuscript, n.d.
composer. His score for The Cobweb is not notably aggregate-based, but it uses a twelve-tone
series as a source of motivic material, and these motives are subjected to various kinds of
development, including the use of the familiar twelve-tone transformations: transposition,
inversion, retrograde, and combinations of these. Rosenman employed this compositional
style, as many later film composers did, to express intense and often negative emotions:
“[I did not do it] simply because I felt it was important to write a serial score. I felt that
the film really could have used this kind of treatment. I also felt that it would have set off
the film as not simply a pot-boiler melodrama which happened to center around an insane
asylum but rather a film in which this kind of expressionistic music could be, so to speak,
mind reading or, as I say, super-real.”78
Elliott Carter (1908– ). Although Carter has never identified himself as a twelve-tone
composer, all of his music can be described as the thorough and systematic exploration
of the aggregate of twelve pitch classes, especially its division into smaller collections and
the combination of smaller collections to create larger ones. Beginning in 1980 with Night
Fantasies, Carter’s music uses extended progressions of twelve-note chords that shape the
surrounding melodic and contrapuntal activity and are involved in projecting large-scale
polymetric schemes.
Peter Lieberson (1946– ). As a student of Babbitt, Martino, and Wuorinen, Lieberson grew
up in the American postwar twelve-tone tradition. But his career path has been notably
different from theirs: he holds no academic position, has written no music-theoretical prose
or, indeed, virtually anything about his own music, and lives far from the academic centers of
the American Northeast. Most of Lieberson’s music since his student days has been twelve
tone in orientation, although he has generally been more concerned with the aggregate
and its division into hexachords than with serial ordering and serial transformation (the
hexachords relate to each other as unordered collections, not as serially ordered lines).
Myth No. 6: The Myth of Serial Orthodoxy

The myth of serial orthodoxy maintains that there is a single normative way to
compose serial music and that everything else represents a deviation or the taking
of a liberty.
Copland remained consistently critical of the twelve-tone method as found in certain works
by Schoenberg and many of his followers. He believed, rather, in expanding the method
to permit more spontaneous procedures; he liked in particular to see it accommodate
tonal resources. . . . Copland’s actual use of the row marks an even greater divergence from
twelve-tone orthodoxy.79
In fact, there is an extraordinary variety of serial music, sharing only an attitude

and a point of departure. There is no orthodoxy, and thus no possibility of heresy.
As Krenek observed in 1953, relatively early in the game, “the practice of the twelve-
tone technique has been rather flexible from the outset, inasmuch as its inaugurators
immediately accepted the invitation to variety held out by the principle they had
78
Quoted in Roy M. Prendergast, Film Music, A Neglected Art: A Critical Study of Music in Films,
2nd edn. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 119. For an account of Rosenman’s film and concert music,
which also was often twelve-tone in one way or another, see Sabine M. Feisst, “Serving Two Masters:
Leonard Rosenman’s Music for Films and for the Concert Hall,” 21st Century Music 7/5 (May 2000):
19–25.
79
Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Henry
Holt, 1999), 447.
378 Straus
discovered.”80 In the years since, the twelve-tone enterprise has diversified in ways
Krenek could not have imagined. In retrospect, we can find remarkable stylistic and
structural variety among twelve-tone composers, within the oeuvre of individual
composers, and even within single works.
Schoenberg himself cannot represent twelve-tone orthodoxy inasmuch as his own
practice varied so much from work to work, including the tetrachordal organization
of the Suite for Piano, op. 25, the rotational schemes of the Wind Quintet, the
multiple rows of the String Quartet no. 3, the eighteen-note row of the String Trio,
and the “tropic” organization of the Violin Phantasy.81 Schoenberg’s twelve-tone
practice is much more varied than is often realized.
Schoenberg’s Second Viennese School colleagues, Webern and Berg, offered al-
ternative twelve-tone practices right from the start. The three composers share an
interest in organizing the aggregate of all twelve pitch classes and in serial ordering
and transformation, but beyond that common concern each pursues the twelve-tone
idea in a distinctive direction. And there is no good reason to regard Webern and
Berg as deviating from an established orthodoxy. What is sometimes referred to as
Schoenberg’s “mature style” had not yet crystallized when Webern and Berg created
their own distinctive twelve-tone languages and, as observed above, Schoenberg’s
style itself was rather flexible. We should understand Webern and Berg on their own
terms rather than as deviating from a Schoenbergian practice that was itself variable.
Among American twelve-tone composers, the notion of orthodoxy becomes even
less tenable. American twelve-tone practice has included the very different rotational
schemes of Crawford, Krenek, and Stravinsky, Babbitt’s trichordal, all-partition,
and super arrays, Carter’s twelve-note chords, Mamlok’s contracting concentric
circles through an array, Wuorinen’s time-point system, Martino’s “chain forms,”
Perle’s twelve-tone tonality, Rochberg’s “spatialization,” Shapey’s “Mother Lode,”
Finney’s “complementarity,” Copland’s “freely interpreted tonalism,” Berger’s “neo-
classic twelve-tone music,” Morris’s “compositional designs,” and many more. Each
composer has a distinctive way (or perhaps more than one way) of composing
twelve-tone music. There is no single orthodoxy against which heresies may be
measured, no single mainstream with smaller tributaries.
One of the principal factors precluding the emergence of twelve-tone ortho-
doxy was simple ignorance. A standard practice cannot exist unless that practice
is widely known. As a general matter, twelve-tone composers have had only lim-
ited technical knowledge of their colleagues’ music. Schoenberg wrote very little
about his twelve-tone method, and his American students (including John Cage,
Patricia Carpenter, Lou Harrison, Richard Hoffman, Earl Kim, Leon Kirchner,
Dika Newlin, and Leonard Rosenman,) were not notably active in promoting it.82
Because the ultra-modern composers knew very little actual music by Schoenberg,
80
Ernst Krenek, “Is the Twelve-Tone Technique on the Decline?” The Musical Quarterly 39/4
(1953): 517.
81
“Tropic” is a term used in David Lewin, “A Study of Hexachord Levels in Schoenberg’s Violin
Fantasy [sic],” Perspectives of New Music 6/1 (Autumn–Winter 1967): 18–32, to refer to the treatment
of the hexachord as an unordered collection, in the manner of Hauer’s “tropes.”
82
See Alan P. Lessem, “Teaching Americans Music: Some Émigré Composer Viewpoints, ca.
1930–1955,” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 11/1 (June 1988): 4–22.
Webern, or Berg (scores and recordings were almost entirely unavailable), they
took what they knew and continued in their own directions. Scores and recordings
continued to be relatively scarce after the war and, even when available, it was
difficult to glean from them the outlines of a twelve-tone compositional method.
Published sources in English, including treatises by Krenek, Leibowitz, Rufer, and
Perle, were incomplete at best.83 What little the American composers could discover
of contemporary developments in postwar Europe was of little interest to them—
insofar as the Americans know what Boulez, Stockhausen, and the other Darmstadt
composers were doing, they were dismissive of it (and the favor was returned with
interest). Personal networks were a better but still not necessarily reliable source of
information. A significant technical, music-theoretical literature began to emerge
starting around 1960, especially in the pages of Perspectives of New Music, but this
literature was generally too challenging linguistically to reach a wide audience, even
among composers.
One can think of the history of twelve-tone composition as a series of misreadings,
based in some cases on the kind of willed resistance to predecessor works described
by Harold Bloom, but based more often simply on lack of reliable information.
American twelve-tone composers have never coalesced into a single or even a
number of identifiable serial schools. What we have instead is a group of highly
individual independent thinkers who vary widely in the extent of their mutual
knowledge and even more widely in their compositional practice.
Arthur Berger (1912–2003). Berger’s twelve-tone music, especially in the 1950s, had a
distinctively neoclassical quality, as though Berger were seeking a musical rapprochement
of neoclassicism and serialism. More accurately, it appears as though Berger found in
twelve-tone serialism a way of crystallizing and intensifying his Stravinskyian concerns with
rhythmic incisiveness, clarity of texture, and concern with the integrity and expressiveness
of the individual interval. His description of his Chamber Music for Thirteen Players (1956)
as a “neoclassic twelve-tone” work might also be applied to many of his works from the
period.84
Samuel Barber (1910–81). Whereas Berger (like Stravinsky) gradually abandoned his neo-
classical orientation and remained a twelve-tone composer for the rest of his life, Barber (like
Britten, Shostakovich, and Piston) never ceased being a tonal composer but nonetheless
incorporated twelve-tone structures from time to time.85 In both his Piano Sonata (1949)
and Nocturne (1959), Barber found ways of staging a musical drama in which tonal and
twelve-tone elements are juxtaposed and, with varying degrees of completeness, integrated
with each other.
83
Krenek, Studies in Counterpoint; René Leibowitz, Schoenberg and His School (New York: Philo-
sophical Library, 1949); Josef Rufer, Composition with Twelve Notes, trans. Humphrey Searle (London:
Barrie and Rockliff, 1954); and George Perle, Serial Composition and Atonality (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1962).
84
“Chamber Music for Thirteen Players was a work I wrote in 1956 close to my arrival at serialism,
and tongue-in-cheek I described it as ‘neoclassic twelve-tone.’ ” See Arthur Berger, Reflections of an
American Composer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 97.
85
Barbara Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and his Music (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992), refers to “Barber’s tendency during the fifties to flirt with twelve-tone procedures in
combination with tonal structures” (402). Barber’s intermittent interest in serialism and his attempt
to integrate it with aspects of traditional tonality are both reasonably typical of American twelve-tone
compositional practice.
380 Straus
Irving Fine (1914–62). Fine, identified by Copland along with Berger as a member of
a neoclassical, Boston-based “Stravinsky School,” became a twelve-tone composer before
Stravinsky did. His twelve-tone music is grounded in the twelve-tone series and its canonical
transformations, but is relatively free as to serial ordering and treats the series to various
partitioning schemes rather than presenting complete series statements. Fine has a notion of
embellishing series tones with either series-derived or more neutral kinds of figuration.86 His
twelve-tone music also maintains a strong sense of pitch centricity, evocative of traditional
tonality.87
Louise Talma (1906–96). Like Fine and Berger, Talma is often identified as a member of
an American neoclassical “Stravinsky School,” and like Fine, Berger, and Stravinsky, she
became a twelve-tone composer in the 1950s, initially in a style she considered relatively
“strict” (up through her opera The Alcestiad in 1958) and then in a more “relaxed” style
she pursued for the rest of her creative life.88 Her twelve-tone works in the more relaxed
style use the series as a point of departure and a source of motivic material more than as
a constant thematic presence. By virtue of the construction of her series and their use, her
music often creates and moves through diatonic and octatonic sound worlds.
Myth No. 7: The Myth of Serial Purity

The myth of serial purity maintains that serial compositions follow certain generic
rules (including alleged rules about avoiding placing emphasis on any one of the
twelve tones through repetition or doubling, avoidance of tonal references, and
using only one series and deriving every note from it or its transformations) in
relation to which nonconforming tones are understood as freedoms or liberties.89
If the myth of serial orthodoxy imagines that twelve-tone repertoires conform
to (or deviate from) a single compositional approach, the myth of serial purity
imagines that individual twelve-tone works conform to, or deviate from, sets of
rules governing details within individual compositions.
But what are we to think of Schoenberg’s American period, during which the greatest
disarray and most deplorable demagnetization appeared? How could we, unless with a
supplementary—and superfluous—measure, judge such lack of comprehension and cohe-
sion, that reevaluation of polarizing functions, even of tonal functions? Rigorous writing
was abandoned in those works. In them we see appearing again the octave intervals, the false
cadences, the exact canons at the octave. Such an attitude attests to maximum incoherence—
a paroxysm in the absurdity of Schoenberg’s incompatibilities.90
86
Letter from Fine to Vincent Persichetti in 1960, cited in Philip Ramey, Irving Fine: An American
Composer in His Time (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 2005), 181: “In the Quartet I occasionally
use chords derived from the series and embellished in various parts with some row derivation.”
87
Fine’s program note for the String Quartet identifies it as “the first work in which I have
employed the twelve-tone technique with some consistency. While all of the melodic material, the
harmonies, and the figuration have been generated by the ‘row,’ the use of the ‘row’ technique is fairly
free; and the work as a whole is frankly tonal, C being the prevailing tonality.” Quoted in Ramey,
Irving Fine, 180.
88
Louise Talma, interview with Luann Dragone, Louise Talma Society, http://www.omnidisc.
com/Talma.html.
89
These “rules” are discussed below as the myth of non-repetition, the myth of anti-tonality, and
the myth of the matrix.
90
Pierre Boulez, “Schoenberg Is Dead,” in Notes of an Apprenticeship, trans. Herbert Weinstock
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 273.
Boulez upholds serial purity as an ideal. By this standard, Schoenberg fails, and most
of American twelve-tone music fails. If we can set aside Boulez’s negative valuation
for a moment, we can acknowledge that his description of Schoenberg’s music is
basically correct. Schoenberg’s music, especially his American music, is permeated
with tonal references, doublings, triads, extramusical associations, and explicit po-
litical agendas. The same observation extends to most American twelve-tone music.
The ultra-moderns (Crawford, Ruggles, and Riegger, especially) avoided writing
purely twelve-tone pieces. It is much more characteristic of their approach to
juxtapose serial and non-serial elements, often for dramatic or expressive purposes.
Among the European émigrés, virtually all would be judged impure by Boulez’s
standards, as would virtually every postwar American serial composer.
Neither Schoenberg himself nor the American twelve-tone composers upheld
serial purity as an ideal in their written comments—I cannot think of any writings
by Schoenberg, Babbitt, or others that share Boulez’s aesthetic attitude.91 American
twelve-tone composers have never maintained an interest in twelve-tone purity.
Rather, from its beginnings and up to the present moment, American twelve-tone
music has been a hybrid enterprise, a music in which serial and non-serial elements
are juxtaposed with each other.
Underlying the myth of serial purity is the incorrect notion that twelve-tone com-
position is a rule-bound enterprise, and that the appearance of non-serial elements,
as well as pitch repetitions, doublings, and tonal reference constitute a violation of
the rules. On the contrary, composers make their own rules on the fly, in the context
of specific compositional situations. Schoenberg noted the following in 1936:
The theorists always fall into the error of believing their theories to be rules for composers
instead of symptoms of the works, rules which a composer has to obey, instead of peculiarities
which are extracted from the works.92
The myth of serial purity (and its corollary belief in a set of rigid rules) is regret-
tably held not only by critics and historians, but in many cases by the composers
themselves. As Arthur Berger bitterly states:
Some of us wrote twelve-tone music without observing the rules promulgated by what I once
named the “New Theorists” of the Princeton school. . . . Such composers were considered
not “strict” but, after all, Schoenberg had also written twelve-tone music without the benefit
of the Princeton theorists.93
In a similar vein, Irving Fine talked about “cheating” when he incorporated elements
that cannot be accounted for readily in relation to the series.94 Indeed, many
91
Schoenberg observed: “In the last few years I have been questioned as to whether certain of my
compositions are ‘pure’ twelve-tone or twelve-tone at all. The fact is that I do not know. I am still
more a composer than a theorist. . . . Whether certain of my compositions fail to be ‘pure’ because
of the surprising appearance of consonant harmonies—surprising even to me—I cannot, as I have
said, decide.” See Arnold Schoenberg, “My Evolution,” in Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold
Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1949] 1975),
91–92.
92
Arnold Schoenberg, “Schoenberg’s Tone Rows,” in Style and Idea, 214 [1936].
93
Berger, Reflections, 86.
94
Ramey notes that “Fine told his wife on several occasions: ‘I can’t follow any strict rules. Whatever
they are, I’m going to break them. Music must sound. The most important thing is what you hear. The
382 Straus
twelve-tone composers defensively maintain that their music is not “strict” but
composed “by ear,” and biographies like those of Fine, Barber, and Copland (cited
above) often take pains to argue that this particular composer is not a “strict”
serialist, but rather one who is willing to bend the “rules” and to take whatever
“liberties” are required by the musical (and presumably non-twelve-tone) ear.
Whether these sorts of comments are made by historians or the composers
themselves, they are based on the misguided assumption that some composers are
writing pure twelve-tone music that follow all of the rules. In fact, serial practice
in the United States has always involved hybridity—there is no example of pure,
strict serialism, no set of “rules” to follow or break. The twelve-tone method is a
procedure, a point of departure, a way composers orient themselves with respect to
the twelve tones, not a system in any sense. Instead of a larger system of rules defining
a central, orthodox practice, there exist loosely connected local practices, each with
its own distinctive set of compositional procedures. The individual practices may be
systematic to varying degrees, but there is no single, overriding twelve-tone system.
Gunther Schuller (1925– ). A musical polymath, with careers as a composer, horn player,
conductor, historian, and administrator, Schuller has been closely identified with what he
dubbed “third stream” music, “a new genre of music located about halfway between jazz
and classical music.”95 His comments on Transformation (1956) may be taken as applying
to much of his twelve-tone music: “In my own ‘Transformation’ a variety of musical
concepts converge: twelve-tone technique, Klangfarbenmelodie (tone-color-melody), jazz
improvisation, and metric breaking up of the jazz beat. . . . The intention in this piece
was never to fuse jazz and classical elements into a totally new alloy, but rather to present
them initially in succession—in peaceful coexistence—and later, in close, more competitive
juxtaposition.”96
Mel Powell (1923–98). Powell had two separate and equally distinguished careers, one
in jazz and the other in “classical” music. From the mid-1950s through the end of his
career Powell was a composer of twelve-tone music. For the most part, Powell kept his
two musical worlds quite separate, but some of the improvisatory spirit of jazz (if nothing
of its rhythms and harmonies) permeates Powell’s classical music. Powell’s twelve-tone
music is usually based on what he called a “pitch tableau,” an aggregate of all twelve pitch
classes within which register is generally fixed (that is, each pitch class occurs in only one
register) and order is generally not fixed.97 Within a tableau, the melodic/harmonic surface
is essentially improvised against the backdrop of the registrally fixed pitch classes, and one
finds considerable repetition of pitches.
Hale Smith (1925– ). Like Schuller and Powell, Smith had a distinguished lineage in both
classical (he was a student of Marcel Dick) and jazz traditions (he had broad experience as
a performer, composer, and orchestrator of jazz). But unlike Schuller (who strove for an
explicit juxtaposition and integration of serial writing and jazz) or Powell (who sought to
keep his two musical worlds as separate as possible), Smith wrote twelve-tone music that
ear is the ultimate arbiter.’ Fine’s overall approach to serialism was never to be doctrinaire. Rather, he
utilized it in conjunction with a tightly controlled romanticism.” Ramey, Irving Fine, 179–81.
95
Gunther Schuller, “Third Stream,” in Musings: The Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller (New
York: Oxford University Press, [1961] 1986), 114.
96
Gunther Schuller, “Liner Notes for Transformation,” in Musings, 131–32 [1957].
97
Anthony Kroyt Brandt, “The Absence of Nouns: Mel Powell’s Harmonic Language,” Aperiodical
2/1 (Spring 1988): 42–44.
subtly engages jazz, more as a mood or an inflection than a structural determinant.98 With
reference to his twelve-tone piano piece Evocation (1966), Smith commented: “The entire
piece derives from the row exposed in the first stave, and in several places has faint but
definite affinities to jazz phrasing. This doesn’t mean that it’s supposed to swing—it isn’t,
but the affinities are there.”99
Myth No. 8: The Myth of Non-Repetition

The myth of non-repetition maintains that serial music is designed to prevent any
of the twelve tones from receiving any particular musical emphasis by requiring
that no tone may be repeated until the remaining eleven have been sounded.
Music written in the tradition of functional harmony strikes some sort of balance between
repetition and change: between the redundant and the unexpected. Twelve-tone atonalism
was, among other things, a total rejection of redundancy: the avoidance of repetition was
axiomatic.100
Among the most important rules of the twelve-tone system, what is sometimes called the
“constant circulation” rule, requires that all twelve tones be presented in a work before any
one is repeated.101
[Irving] Fine’s serialism had little to do with Schoenberg’s, for he ignored Schoenberg’s rules
about the avoidance of note repetition and doubling at the octave.102
In fact, while the principle of non-repetition typically applies to a twelve-tone series,

it has never been true of any twelve-tone work, by Schoenberg or anyone else. In
a narrow logical sense, it could only be true of a single melodic line in which the
twelve pitch classes were presented again and again in the same order, and even
in such a case, notes will always receive differential emphasis by virtue of registral
position and duration. If the order of the notes changes at all, there will be repetition
before all twelve notes have been heard. In twelve-tone music, as in most music,
more than one event is going on at a time: melodies vary in shape and are typically
accompanied by harmonies, or by other melodies. In such situations, it would be
impossible to apply the principle of non-repetition even if one wanted to.
The myth of non-repetition has its roots in some of Schoenberg’s statements, but
not in anything he or anyone else actually did. Schoenberg’s best-known comment
on the subject suggests that he is talking about non-repetition within the series, not
within the music:
This method [i.e., Composing with Twelve Tones Which are Related Only with One Another]
consists primarily of the constant and exclusive use of a set of twelve different tones. This
98
See Horace Maxile, “Hale Smith’s ‘Evocation’: The Interaction of Cultural Symbols and Serial
Composition,” Perspectives of New Music 42/2 (Summer 2004): 122–43.
99
Liner notes for Natalie Hinderas, Piano Music by African American Composers (CRI CD-629,
1992), cited in ibid., 124. Maxile demonstrates in Evocation “sensitive interaction between the worlds
of the African-American vernacular and music of the European tradition” (122) and concludes that,
in this work, “African-American signification is deeply embedded within [Smith’s] serial contexts”
(140).
100
Peter Kivy, New Essays on Musical Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), 62.
101
Raffman, “Is Twelve-Tone Music Artistically Defective?” 70.
102
Ramey, Irving Fine, 180.
384 Straus
means, of course, that no tone is repeated within the series and that it uses all twelve tones
of the chromatic scale, though in a different order.103
In actuality, almost from the beginning, Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music cultivated

repetitions of all kinds, within and between parts. Even a cursory look at any passage
of his music, especially the later, American works, will confirm this tendency, as will
a survey of the analytical literature on Schoenberg, with its pronounced emphasis
on pitch-class invariance, that is, on the rhetorically charged repetition of notes and
groups of notes. Twelve-tone music is best regarded as a method for creating and
channeling repetition than for precluding it.
Myth No. 9: The Myth of Anti-Tonality

The myth of anti-tonality maintains that twelve-tone music is designed to avoid
referring to the sonorities (i.e., consonant triads), textures, forms, and sense of key
associated with common-practice tonal music.
[With the waning of the serial “hegemony,” Bolcom expresses relief that he does] “not to
have to worry about two hundred composers looking over your shoulder disapprovingly if
you dare to write a triad.104
By embracing the earlier traditions of tonality and combining them with the more re-
cently developed atonality, I found it possible to release my music from the overintense,
expressionistic manner inherent in a purely serially organized, constant chromaticism.105
Tonal effects and references were part of the serial enterprise from the very beginning
and it would be more accurate to say that twelve-tone serialism, as practiced by
Schoenberg and by many American twelve-tone composers, is a way of creating and
shaping tonal references—it is frequently about evoking and channeling tonality,
not about repressing it.
Like the myth of non-repetition, the myth of anti-tonality probably has its roots
in written comments by Schoenberg, such as the following statement: “In twelve-
tone composition consonances (major and minor triads) and also the simpler
dissonances (diminished triads and seventh chords)—in fact almost everything
that used to make up the ebb and flow of harmony—are, as far as possible,
avoided.”106 But Schoenberg made such comments early on, when there was very
little twelve-tone music in existence. Indeed, his words are contradicted by his
own practice and provide a caveat about relying solely on what composers say
103
Arnold Schoenberg, “Composition with Twelve Tones (1),” in Style and Idea, 218 [1941].
104
Bolcom, “The End of the Mannerist Century,” 47. For a sustained attempt to perpetuate the myth
of anti-tonality, see William Thomson, Schoenberg’s Error (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1991).
105
Rochberg, “The New Image of Music,” 239. By subscribing to the myth of serial purity, Rochberg
remains unaware of the extent to which twelve-tone music generally and American twelve-tone music
in particular has deliberately and characteristically internalized traditional tonal relationships.
106
Arnold Schoenberg, “Twelve-Tone Composition,” in Style and Idea, 207 [1923]. Similarly, “Even
a slight reminiscence of the former tonal harmony would be disturbing, because it would create false
expectations of consequences and continuations. The use of a tonic is deceiving if it is not based on
all the relationships of tonality” (Schoenberg, “Composition with Twelve Tones,” 219).
instead of examining the music they write. Traditionally tonal forms and structures
play a significant, explicit role in Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music, from the Suite,
op. 25, through the American works of his final creative period. Critics have dis-
agreed on the role of tonality in Schoenberg’s music, some viewing it as a source of
(often ironic) reference, others as a structural determinant, but no one denies its
presence.
To a large extent, American twelve-tone composers have followed Schoenberg’s
lead in incorporating extensive and pervasive tonal references throughout their
music. Indeed, I would argue that amid the astonishing diversity of American
twelve-tone writing, a persistent engagement with traditional tonality is a unifying
and defining characteristic. In Copland’s case, for example, his comments on his
Piano Fantasy apply equally well to all of his twelve-tone music:
The Piano Fantasy is by no means rigorously controlled twelve-tone music, but it makes
liberal use of devices associated with that technique. It seemed to me at the time that the
twelve-tone method was pointing in two opposite directions: toward the extreme of total
organization with electronic applications, and toward a gradual absorption into what had
become a very freely interpreted tonalism. My use of the method in the Piano Fantasy was
of the latter kind.107
Something similar is true of Wuorinen’s twelve-tone “time-point system,” which

is designed precisely to project centric effects.108 The focus on particular notes is
a persistent feature of Martino’s twelve-tone music, and some pieces, such as the
Seven Pious Pieces and the Paradiso Choruses, have not only a sense of pitch centricity
but a distinctively triadic, tonal sound.109 One of the most distinctive aspects
of Finney’s twelve-tone music is its persistent sense of tonal center. For Finney,
and for many other American serialists, one of the attractions of the twelve-tone
approach was precisely the ways in which it enabled rather than discouraged tonal
effects:
Now my music always was and still is tonal. Even my twelve-tone music is tonal. . . . [My
Sixth String Quartet] was tonal because when I got to the end, it was tonic. I would have
bridge passages that would lead from one level to another. This process of modulation, or
movement, was function. In other words, it was the function that concerned me. It was
107
Copland and Perlis, Copland Since 1943, 242.
108
Louis Karchin, “Pitch Centricity as an Organizing Principle in Speculum Speculi of Charles
Wuorinen,” Theory and Practice 14/15 (1989–90): 59–82, describes pitch centricity as “an idea that
has been central to Wuorinen’s thinking” (59), and he quotes Wuorinen as saying, with regard to the
use of pitch centers within a serial framework, that this is “bringing back an aspect of tonality which
may have been abandoned unnecessarily.” Similarly, Kresky, “The Recent Music of Wuorinen,” points
out that “given Wuorinen’s oft-stated interest in a reconciliation of the general twelve-tone way with
the tonal past, this scheme may in the large involve various kinds of “tonicization” of these successive
underlying set pitches, as well as the more fundamental promotion of the zero pitch [i.e. the first
pitch] of the set. (Indeed, even in earlier pieces his sets tend to unfold slowly at first, often with special
emphasis on the first pitch, which is likely to be heard in this way again at the end.)” (415).
109
“I couldn’t have written any of these pieces without the twelve-tone system. I would have been
lost if I’d just tried to write tonal music the way other people are doing. . . . The tonal aspects are on
the surface, while a chromatic language is guiding the background.” See Boros, “A Conversation with
Donald Martino,” 249.
386 Straus
function that was concerning me when I was with Alban Berg. It’s tonal, but it isn’t triadic.
I don’t consider triadic [to be] of any more importance than anything else.110
In twelve-tone music, especially as practiced in America, tonal effects and refer-

ences were not an unintended or undesired by-product but rather a fundamental
part of the enterprise from the very beginning.
Myth No. 10: The Myth of Math

The myth of math maintains that twelve-tone music is controlled by mathematical
formulas, precluding compositional liberty and the intervention of the musical ear.
Forty years ago the serialists held the greatest intimidating force in the small world of
modern composition; then there was a terrific rebellion against many of its assumptions—I
was certainly part of that rebellion—and now it is OK to attack all serialists, indeed all the
new music of the period roughly between 1950 and 1975. And it is true that much ugly
music of that time, written with the help of complex pseudo-mathematical processes, really
doesn’t need rehearing.111
Serious composers, experimental in the 1920s, socially aware in the 1930s, and quieted by
war in the 1940s, suddenly diverged in two totally different but equally radical paths. Some,
extending ideas of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, sought total determination of
every nuance of a piece through mathematical calculations.112
Although mathematics has played a significant role in theorizing twelve-tone

music (and all music), it has played a negligible role in the composition of twelve-
tone music. Music theorists (including composer-theorists like Babbitt, Carter,
Perle, Martino, and Wuorinen) have used mathematical formalisms to generate
and model abstract, precompositional musical materials. They theorize general,
abstract relations among the twelve tones. Twelve-tone composers, however, while
they may use these theoretical models as a point of departure, compose their music
in the usual way, with contextual decisions guided by their musical ears.113 The
math does not and cannot control or determine the music in any meaningful sense.
110
Hitchens, Ross Lee Finney, 16–17. Finney had been one of Berg’s few American students. Finney
used the term “complementarity” to refer to the integration of twelve-tone and tonal approaches: the
local successions would be governed by twelve-tone relations, but the large-scale organization would
be defined by a succession of centric pitch classes, that is, of tonal tonics. Note that this is precisely the
opposite of Martino’s procedure.
111
Bolcom, “The End of the Mannerist Century,” 47. Italics added.
112
Broyles, Mavericks, 154. Italics added.
113
Andrew Mead, “Twelve-Tone Composition and the Music of Elliott Carter,” in Concert Music,
Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies, ed. Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard
Hermann (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1995), 70: “Twelve-tone rows are themselves
abstractions, ordered in but one musical dimension that is not specified precompositionally in any
way. The musical articulation of a row is a compositional act, both in terms of what musical dimension
manifests the row’s elements and its order, and in terms of what collectional and ordinal groupings
with the row are highlighted. . . . A row class does not determine how a composition goes; in itself
it provides a distribution of all the materials of the total chromatic, and in conjunction with the
compositional selection of materials, it provides opportunities for creating hierarchies of relationships
in a composition. But it is the act of composition that marshals these potentialities into the living
process that is a piece of music.”
Speculative music theory of all kinds and in all eras involves the use of numbers
to model musical phenomena, and a good deal of twelve-tone theory has qualities
of intellectual rigor, systematic thought and exposition, and formal and often
mathematical language. These would all seem to be highly desirable qualities in a
theory. But there is no reason to assume that the same qualities characterize the
music these theorists are attempting to describe. Indeed, it is a logical fallacy to
attribute the qualities of a theoretical model to the music being modeled. Twelve-
tone theory may often be cerebral, academic, mathy—that’s the nature of music
theory—but that tells us nothing about the internal qualities of the music. To put
it most bluntly, it is wrong to confuse what the theorists say and the way they say it
for what the composers do and how they do it (and it’s still wrong even when the
theorists in question are themselves composers).
Whether formalized or not, twelve-tone precompositional designs exert relatively little
control over the actual, audible musical events. Far from predetermining or overdetermining
what happens in a work, the various twelve-tone systems provide merely a useful starting
point, a way of thinking about the twelve tones.114
The twelve-tone approach opens up a musical world not of mathematical overde-

termination, but rather of creative underdermination, a world of associational
networks created contextually rather than a rigid hierarchy imposed from outside.
The myth of math appears to have two principal sources. First, it involves a
familiar confusion of the European and American approaches to twelve-tone com-
position. The relatively small group of American twelve-tone composers who ac-
tually engaged mathematical formalism in some way did so as a way of gaining
perspective on the relations among the twelve tones in an abstract, precomposi-
tional way, not as a way of composing music. Second, historians have paid too much
attention to what composers have said and the manner in which they said it and too
little attention to the music they wrote and the manner in which they wrote it. As
with many of the myths surveyed in this article, the myth of math is best disposed
of by looking at and listening to the actual music.
Myth No. 11: The Myth of the Matrix

The myth of the matrix holds that the pitches of a twelve-tone piece can be re-
ferred to the forty-eight members of a row class presented in the familiar 12 × 12
114
Joseph Dubiel is addressing Babbitt’s conception of twelve-tone music when he makes this
point, but it applies equally well to a wide range of twelve-tone music: “I urge that, as we continue to
speak of Babbitt’s music as twelve-tone, we try to undermine the received image of the twelve-tone
system as a forceful method of construction, and portray it instead as a loose and flexible way to define
some possibilities of choice. I propose that we set aside our habit of trying to show how great the
system’s reach is, and emphasize just how little it specifies in any circumstances in which it operates. . . .
If, after all I’ve put you through, you wonder why I would want to acknowledge the existence of the
twelve-tone system at all, instead of just the meticulously, almost aggressively antihierarchical web of
association that I present as the system’s perceptible face, I might answer that I do it precisely so that I
can say how little the system specifies about the configurations that will occur, and how discontinuous
and unpredictable the system’s interpretive influence is likely to be, when it can be felt. I do it so that
I can point out that someone actually designed a musical system to stand back this far, to operate
in this extraordinarily limited way.” See Joseph Dubiel, “What’s the Use of the Twelve-Tone System?”
Perspectives of New Music 35/2 (Summer 1997): 37, 49.
388 Straus
matrix: twelve primes, twelve inversion, twelve retrogrades, and twelve retrograde-
inversions. The myth has origins in a study of much of Schoenberg’s and Webern’s
music, for example, which can be understood in terms of explicit, demonstrable
statements of members of the row class. However, most American postwar twelve-
tone music uses a different approach. In many cases, a work might derive only some
of its material explicitly from the series and its transformations—the remaining
music might be loosely derived from the series or strongly contrast with it. This
kind of hybridity is a feature of the music of Riegger, Crawford, Schuller, Sessions,
Copland, and many others, indeed, it is one of the defining characteristics of
American twelve-tone music.
In other cases, composers have devised twelve-tone systems that are not primarily
concerned with the series and its transformations. Examples include Krenek and
Stravinsky’s rotational schemes (which focus on the hexachord, not on the series),
Perle’s “twelve-tone tonality,” Shapey’s “Mother Lode,” Mamlok’s individual paths
through the matrix (which rarely produce an actual series statement), and Martino
and Carter’s systematic exploration of the aggregate and its partitions. Similarly,
Wuorinen points out the impossibility in most of his music of identifying specific
series forms—the series is not normally an explicit, thematic element of the musical
surface: “[I]f you went hunting in any of my works for the last, at least quarter
century, looking for the row, you’re going to have a very hard time.”115
Like Babbitt and Wuorinen, Martino is a twelve-tone composer in whose music
one rarely finds explicit statements of a twelve-tone series:
I hold a broad view of the twelve-tone system which permits me to use the set or sets I have
formulated as a source from which to draw a network of deductions. I tend to see the set
as a premise that leads me in certain directions. You may not even be able to find it after
a while, but the fact that I’ve formulated it, that it’s back there somewhere, guiding my
actions, means that it is still operative in the profoundest sense. If that’s what serialism is,
then I suppose I am a serial composer.116
Krenek and Stravinsky voiced similar sentiments considerably earlier.117

In the popular imagination, and in many historical accounts and textbooks, a
twelve-tone piece is imagined as one that can be understood in terms of concatenated
statements of a twelve-tone series, related by transposition, inversion, retrograde,
or combinations of these, that is, as musical explorations of a row class. In reality,
115
“Charles Wuorinen in Conversation with Frank J. Oteri,” 5 June 2007, http://www.
Newmusicbox.org.
116
Boros, “A Conversation with Donald Martino,” 250–51.
117
“The essential virtue of the twelve-tone technique was not embodied in the mechanical om-
nipresence of the entire row, but rather in the unification of the design through tightly related motivic
patterns. If a set of such patterns is derived from a complete row by subdivision and rotation, it seems
to offer sufficient possibilities for maintaining that kind of balance which is expressed in the concept
of twelve tones ‘related only with one another.’ ” See Krenek, “Is the Twelve-Tone Technique on the
Decline?” 521. “Originally, a series, or row (the horizontal emphasis of that word!) was a gravitational
substitute and the consistently exploited basis of a composition, but now it is seldom more than a
point of departure.” See Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Themes and Episodes (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1966), 58.
however, relatively few twelve-tone works can be understood in this way, and the
familiar twelve-by-twelve matrix is thus largely useless as a descriptive tool.
Abandoning the myth of the matrix has implications in several directions. First,
analysis of twelve-tone music needs to proceed on a more context-sensitive basis.
There are many ways of writing a twelve-tone piece, and correspondingly many ways
of analyzing them. Second, the emerging field of music perception and cognition
needs to acknowledge the relative uselessness of studies that take the twelve-tone
series and the row class as their points of departure. If we want to learn how
keen listeners hear twelve-tone music, we need to have a sense of what sorts of
relationships there are in the music to which they might usefully attend. As noted
above, the row class is often not the best or most immediate source of musical
relationships, and accordingly the ability to recognize a twelve note series under
pitch-class transposition, inversion, retrograde, or retrograde-inversion will not be
particularly useful, or worth measuring. Finally, the histories we write about this
music need to take better account of its actual organization, which may relate to
a twelve-tone series and its familiar transformations indirectly, distantly, evasively,
or not at all.
Myth No. 12: The Myth of Un-Americanness

The myth of un-Americanness maintains that twelve-tone music, because it lacks
a direct connection with American vernacular and popular traditions, is more
European than American.
For several decades, native composers had been moving toward a style that reflected some-
thing of America’s indigenous music, something of the character of the American people.
American audiences were beginning to respond to some of this music. . . . [In the postwar
period, however,] American composers in effect started all over again, rather than blending
elements of foreign music with the emerging American musical language. In following this
path, they also asked their listeners to begin again, to forget earlier attempts at an American
style, to attempt to come to terms with a musical language making no reference to cultural,
aesthetic, or musical elements of their own country.118
European modernism has been associated in the US with the “East-coast, academic” com-
posers and thus opposed to the more “authentically American” experimentalists. As far
as I am aware, the “East-coast academic” composers in their turn associated themselves
with the European avant garde. In doing so they tended to seize on aspects with which they
themselves were more comfortable, and these were primarily concerned with the ideology of
autonomy: hence, for instance, the “hard-core formalism” early years of Perspectives of New
Music. Thus, the representation of the avant garde by “East-coast, academic” composers,
who have mostly shied away from the messy politicization and rampant radicalism of
Darmstadt, has contributed to the one-sided view of modernism in general. The irony
here is that the European avant garde, for its part, has overwhelmingly sympathized with
the American experimental tradition and, on the whole, has shown little interest in the
academic school.119
118
Charles Hamm, Music in the New World (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 561–62.
119
Björn Heile, “Darmstadt as Other: British and American Responses to Musical Modernism,”
twentieth-century music 1/2 (2004): 173. Heile’s use of scare quotes suggests his skepticism towards
the view that American twelve-tone composers were somehow inauthentically American.
390 Straus
Setting aside the unsettling echoes in a critique of a music as insufficiently rooted

in the blood and soil of the fatherland, the myth of un-Americanness simultaneously
underestimates the extent to which twelve-tone music in the United States connects
with distinctly American musical traditions, cultivated and vernacular, and the
extent to which it has come to occupy a distinctive place in the history and texture
of American music.120
As we have seen, a good deal of American twelve-tone music (by Schuller, Smith,
and others, including Babbitt, the composer of All Set) makes explicit reference
to jazz, an uncontroversially American music. Indeed, as I have argued, this kind
of hybridity is one of the hallmarks of American twelve-tone music. Beyond its
reference to the American vernacular, however, twelve-tone music by American
composers forms a significant and distinctive feature of American musical life,
before and after World War II, and up to the present moment. Whatever its intrinsic
merits, this music has become an important part of our national tradition, no less
American than jazz, Cage-inspired experimentalism, or any other musical style one
might name.
As we continue to write the history of American music since 1925 and account
for the position of twelve-tone music within that history, we have four principal
obligations that have not yet been adequately met. First, we have the obligation to
describe twelve-tone music accurately. That will require listening to it and studying
it, not merely repeating conventional falsehoods about non-repetition, anti-tonality,
and mathematical formulas. Second, the music we describe should include a broad
range of twelve-tone music, not just music of one or two “great men.” Third, we have
an obligation to write more comprehensive histories of twelve-tone composition in
the United States, expanding our study to the decades before and after the 1950s and
1960s—too many standard historical accounts have collectively erased twelve-tone
music from discussions of American music after 1970. Last, we need to abandon
historiographical models that presume a steady evolution and favor the newest
currents; instead, we should focus on providing thicker descriptions of the full
range of musical activity—histories that acknowledge modernist styles, including
twelve-tone serialism, as vibrant strands within the postmodern musical fabric.
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A Revisionist History of Twelve-Tone Serialism in American Music

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Journal of the Society for American Music (2008) Volume 2, Number 3, pp. 355–395.

A Revisionist History of Twelve-Tone Serialism

of established composers (including Stravinsky, Copland, and Sessions) modified

Myth No. 1: The Myth of Serial Origins

The continued activity of ultra-modern composers (especially Riegger),

generation of American-born composers (especially Perle, Babbitt, and Ben Weber)

Myth No. 2: The Myth of Integral Serialism

American composers have generally not been interested in European-style inte-

Myth No. 3: The Myth of Serial Tyranny

Myth No. 4: The Myth of Serial Demise

Myth No. 5: The Myth of the Academic Serialist

Myth No. 6: The Myth of Serial Orthodoxy

In fact, there is an extraordinary variety of serial music, sharing only an attitude

Myth No. 7: The Myth of Serial Purity

Myth No. 8: The Myth of Non-Repetition

In fact, while the principle of non-repetition typically applies to a twelve-tone series,

In actuality, almost from the beginning, Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music cultivated

Myth No. 9: The Myth of Anti-Tonality

Something similar is true of Wuorinen’s twelve-tone “time-point system,” which

In twelve-tone music, especially as practiced in America, tonal effects and refer-

Myth No. 10: The Myth of Math

Although mathematics has played a significant role in theorizing twelve-tone

The twelve-tone approach opens up a musical world not of mathematical overde-

Myth No. 11: The Myth of the Matrix

Krenek and Stravinsky voiced similar sentiments considerably earlier.117

Myth No. 12: The Myth of Un-Americanness

Setting aside the unsettling echoes in a critique of a music as insufficiently rooted

Clarkson, Austin. “‘The Fantasy Can Be Critically Examined’: Composition and

Horsley, Paul. “For an Early Post-Modernist, A Day of Overdue Vindication.” New

Oteri, Frank J. “Charles Wuorinen in Conversation with Frank J. Oteri.” NewMusic-

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