HWM II - 9

Serialism

Aftermath of WWII
• Economical and cultural collapse in Europe and the Soviet Union
• Infra-structure destroyed
• Millions homeless or displaced
• Marshall plan
• American help to Western Europe (+ anti-communist)
• Iron Curtain & Cold War (c1947-1991)
• Political and military tension between so-called Western Bloc and Eastern Bloc
• Soviet regime censors composers
• Philosophy: Existentialism (Jean-Paul Sarte, Simone de Beauvoir)
• Individual freedom, responsibility and subjectivity

Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music (Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue
Musik), Annually 1946-1970; biannually (every two years) since

“Those who looked to the future in the defeated parts of Europe saw the present as a Stunde Null, a ‘zero hour,’ meaning a time
without a past. The necessity to start from scratch, to reject the past in its totality as something tainted if not actually destroyed
in the Holocaust of World War II, was a watchword.” (Richard Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music: Music in the Late
Twentieth Century, 2005, 18).

Twelve-tone music
• Symbol of resistance (“degraded art” for the Nazis)
• Purely musical (“no propaganda”)
• Best example: Anton Webern (not Arnold Schönberg)

“Since the Viennese discoveries, any musician who has not experienced—I do not say understood, but truly experienced—the
necessity of the dodecaphonic language is USELESS. For his entire work brings him up short of the needs of his time.” (Pierre
Boulez, Schönberg est mort, [1952] 1991: 131).

Tonality to serialism
• Tonality: Classical period/Romanticism
• Widened tonality/floating tonality: Late-Romanticism
• Wagner, Debussy
• (Free) atonality: Late-Romanticism/early 20th century
• A.k.a. pan-tonality; post-tonality
• Klangfarbenmelodie
• Bound atonality 1921 and later: Second Viennese School
• A.k.a. 12-tone music; dodecaphony
• Serialism: post-WWII
• More than one parameter in rows (series)
• Confusion in terminology
• A.k.a. total serialism; integral serialism

Olivier Messiaen. Quatre études de rhythme: II. Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (1949)
Pierre Boulez. Structures (1951)
• Based on Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités
• Entirely abstract or conceptual
• Analysis by György Ligeti (“Pierre Boulez: Entscheidung und Automatik in der Structure Ia,”
Die Reihe IV, 1958: 60).
György Ligeti. Artikulation (1958)

Serialism
Musical parameters treated differently
• Pitch: Frequency (Hertz - Hz)
• Rhythm: Duration (milliseconds - ms)
• Dynamics: Loudness (decibel - dB)
• Tape compositions in the Electronic Music Studio (for instance Karlheinz Stockhausen)