The pianist Peter Stadlen worked intensively with Webern on the Variations for Piano op. 27 during the autumn of 1937 prior to giving the first performance of the work, and his testimony is the most detailed of any of the first generation of interpreters of the music of the Second Viennese School:

His comments echo those of the pianist Edward Steuermann and the violinist Rudolph Kolisch, who were able to work directly with Schoenberg and emphasised his reluctance to engage in any discussion of twelve-note technique. One might speculate that this uncharacteristic coyness could well derive from a realisation that emphasis on the organisation of a single component – pitch – could inhibit the integration of all the musical parameters into a convincing interpretation. Be that as it may, the unsubstantiated assertion which opens Stadlen’s account is perhaps more revealing about his own attitude to serial processes than it is about their relative function in the works of Webern and Schoenberg, yet its implications are certainly worth further exploration. Notwithstanding the fact that the order of the basic series itself has not been without musicological controversy and misinterpretation, the Variations op. 27 demonstrate a rigour in the application of dodecaphonic technique which render a purely pitch-based analysis unproblematic (cf. Reference SmithSmith 1986: 210–11). By comparison, even Schoenberg’s first twelve-note works, with their comparatively greater textural variety and occasional use of serial permutation, can present intractable difficulties in terms of analysis of pitch order. The problem is certainly not confined to the Second Viennese composers: the first piece of Boulez’s Structures could almost have been conceived with the lecture hall in mind, yet commentators have been wary of attempting a similar cataloguing of serial procedures in the remainder of the cycle, and with good reason, since it is stating the obvious to point out that any perceived overemphasis on technical matters presupposes that the serial processes themselves yield their secrets to the analyst.

If, in the case of Webern, the transparency of his serial technique can be credited with a ‘vital contribution’ to the perceived ‘beauty’ of a work, how are we to approach the acknowledged link between aesthetic effect and technical means? Fortunately, Webern’s own comments can assist in considering this question:

To pursue this analogy with traditional form a little further, the recapitulation in classical music can indeed be sensed by the listener, but a greater level of awareness of the technical processes is desirable in order to appreciate, for example, the sophisticated humour of a false recapitulation in Haydn or the structural logic behind the subtle changes which might occur in the recapitulation itself. Similarly, whilst the ‘recapitulation’ which occurs in the closing section of the Webern Variations can be sensed intuitively on one level, richer layers of meaning can be revealed by technical investigation. Thus, an analytical strategy which takes account of the return of the series and its retrograde at the original pitch but goes on to a holistic consideration of its deployment in the context of the parameters of rhythm, texture, register, and dynamics is likely lead to an enhanced appreciation of this coda and its function not only as a recapitulation within the third movement, but also as a series of allusions to the opening of the work. Such an approach has none of the certainties of an analysis focused exclusively on dodecaphonic technique, since it is inevitably subject to a personal interpretation of the balance between the component elements, yet it reflects the fact that the score can yield its richness on many levels. Similarly, the characteristic canons and crab canons which are such a feature of the form of each of the three movements of the Variations can be shaped as component elements in the overall phrase structure without the need for understanding the means by which this balance is achieved, or conscious awareness of the convergence between the ‘form’ of the series itself and its elaboration during the course of the work. However, given this perceived convergence between form and technique, Webern’s distinction between ‘how the piece ought to be played, not how it is made’ is a somewhat artificial and potentially restricting one. A performer seeking ways into the style of the music might well decide that precisely such an investigation can lead to a more musically aware interpretation of phrasing and musical structure.

Stadlen’s experience is particularly significant, as his comments form part of the introduction to an annotated score, consisting of markings in the composer’s hand and a transcription of additional comments made during the course of these coaching sessions. As such, although the Stadlen score has been the subject of earlier studies, it is well worth revisiting for the number of issues it raises (Reference WasonWason 1987; cf. Reference Boynton, Grassl and KappBoynton 2002). First, it must be acknowledged unequivocally that the annotated copy is of the greatest practical help to any performer of the work, with its clarification of phrase structure, indications of tempo modifications, expressions of musical character, and additional dynamic and pedal markings. Judging by the extent and nature of the markings, Webern must have worked in fanatical detail, and yet it is no disrespect to the value of the Stadlen score to affirm, as Neil Boynton has observed (Reference Boynton, Grassl and KappBoynton 2002), that the annotations themselves are the product of a composer’s reaction to the playing of an individual during a series of what were in effect coaching sessions on an instrument with its own unique properties of touch and sound quality, in acoustic conditions which cannot be replicated. Broadly speaking, the markings fall into two categories: those that convey details of phrasing and registral connections (the what to do) which may well be taken at face value, and such added details of internal balance in chords and pedal markings (the how to achieve it) which are the product of a coaching session with an individual performer and are therefore of a more provisional nature. Given his reluctance to discuss technical issues related to serialism, it seems highly unlikely that Webern would have shared with Peter Stadlen details of the evolution of the work, and indeed the source material remained unavailable for scholarly perusal for some forty years after the composer’s death. However, investigation of this material can help shed additional light on Webern’s annotations, and on their relationship to the formal processes of the work. The sketches reveal that the opening movement was originally conceived in quintuple time, a stage which was eventually superseded by the greater visual clarity of the published triple metre (cf. Reference BaileyBailey 1995; Reference Boynton, Schweiber and UrbanekBoynton 2009). Turning again to Webern’s annotations, the seemingly inconsistent tenuti marks in the opening system of the first movement reveal themselves as a series of articulations within a series of $\begin{array}{c}5\\ 16\end{array}$ bars, subdividing each bar into units of 3 + 2. One cannot help but wonder whether if Webern had shared this information with the young Stadlen, a similar interpretive result might have been achieved, and with it an enhanced understanding of the rhythmic character of the movement – an explanation of the underlying creative impulse rather than a series of injunctions. Further practical insights, unavailable to an earlier generation of performers, are yielded by even a superficial examination of the drafts for the work. For example, remarkably, an early version of the theme of the third movement contains no fewer than seven changes of tempo, with the contrasts between piano and forte phrases accompanied by ritardandi. The effect, along with the reduced note values of the original $\begin{array}{c}3\\ 8\end{array}$ time-signature is to alter one’s perception of the movement as being much more fluid in character than the rather ascetic appearance of the published score with its $\begin{array}{c}3\\ 2\end{array}$ signature might suggest. Why Webern would have omitted these markings from the score is something of a mystery, especially in view of his concern that the swiftly changing character of his music be communicated in a flexible way. The existence of such a secondary source does not undermine the legitimacy of the published version, but it is an illustration of the fact that all scores, however detailed their notational exactitude, are provisional in their status as records of the composer’s intentions. A further effect of the quadrupling of note values in the published edition is the loss of the connecting beams which were present in profusion in the early sketches. For example, a draft of the first variation in the third movement has a series of connections as shown in Figure 18.1. One might note in passing the recasting of b. 14 into two bars in order that the eleven-bar proportions remain consistent throughout the movement, but more significant is the range of new connections articulated by the original beams. If these groupings are articulated in the context of the comments relating to musical character in the Stadlen score, an enhanced interpretive richness and understanding results. Even more remarkable is the comparison between the printed score and a draft of what became the fourth variation (the inconsistency of bar numbering with the published score is a consequence of the subsequent decision to eliminate two variations). The hand-crossing which is feature of the printed score (bb. 45–56) can encourage a disjointed approach to interpreting this passage, as can the late decision to emphasise the syncopated character of the variation by means of rhythmic displacements and the addition of accents. One can well imagine the dialogue which occurred between composer and interpreter as Webern added pedal marks and indications of phrasing to the score, all features which are implicitly present in the groupings and layout of the original draft (see Figure 18.2).

Figure 18.1 Anton Webern, draft of first variation, third movement of Piano Variations op. 27, bb. 12–23

Figure 18.2 Anton Webern, draft of fourth variation, third movement of Piano Variations op. 27, bb. 56–66

Returning to the first movement of the Variations, even more puzzling than the tenuti marks in the opening bars are the dynamic gradations (< >) placed over individual notes. Stadlen offers the following by way of explanation: ‘The unrealisable “vibrato” signs in bars 2 and 3 … which Webern wrote in my copy, give an idea of the cool, passionate lyricism of expression that he envisioned here’ (Reference StadlenStadlen 1972). Again, an awareness of the context provides an additional perspective on these markings. A letter to Hildegard Jone of 2 September 1937 contains the information that Webern had just put the final touches to a movement for String Quartet. Bearing in mind that the coaching sessions with Stadlen took place in the early autumn of that year, it seems highly likely that Webern had the sonority of the quartet movement very much in his mind at the time and was thinking in terms of the expressive qualities of string instruments as he worked with the young pianist. It is noteworthy that the close of the first movement of the String Quartet op. 28 contains precisely the same dynamic markings – in this context, of course, eminently realisable on string instruments. It could even be the case that in revisiting the piano work during these coaching sessions, Webern might well have become more consciously aware of the quartet-like texture of much of the writing in the first movement of the Variations for Piano.

In view of the information that was not available to Peter Stadlen at the time, his later assertion that, in Webern’s op. 27, ‘an authentic interpretation is impossible without the aid of direct, detailed tradition’ (Reference Stadlen and StadlenStadlen 1979) has to be read in the context of his aversion to the multiple serialism of the post-war period, and (as he saw it) the various – and differing – misinterpretations of Webern’s legacy by the Darmstadt generation (see, inter alia, Reference IddonIddon 2013: 89–100). It is certainly the case that for Stadlen, charged with the responsibility of the first performance, direct access to the composer’s thoughts on interpretation was an important factor in his desire to achieve a performance in accordance with Webern’s wishes – an ‘authentic’ interpretation. Yet the very existence of the Stadlen annotated copy is an admission that the printed score cannot in itself be a comprehensive record of the composer’s intentions, and one might well argue that given the limited performance directions in the published scores, Webern was himself an unwitting contributor to any perceived misinterpretation of his musical legacy. Just as Stadlen’s annotated score offers a counterbalance to an ‘objective’ view of Webern, so musicological research can assist in further clarifying the composer’s intentions – hence assisting in achieving an authentic performance, but one in which the emphasis has subtly shifted from an authenticity based on the composer’s personal intervention to one involving a re-assessment of source material which was unavailable to the first generation of performers. After all, in the final analysis, concern for authenticity is a state of mind in the performer, rather than a checklist of criteria in need of constant updating. As such, the term constantly shifts its focus, as research uncovers fresh evidence relevant to interpretation, and succeeding generations of performers bring their own perspectives and insights to the work in question.

***

Following the resumption of musical life in Germany after the Second World War, Peter Stadlen gave the German premiere of the Variations on 31 July 1948 at the Darmstadt New Music Courses. Within a year of this performance, Olivier Messiaen was invited to Darmstadt to give a performance of his Visions de l’Amen (partnered by Yvonne Loriod), and during his brief visit, he evidently worked on a new piano piece, ‘Mode de valeurs et d’intensités’. Strictly speaking, Messiaen has no part in a discussion of dodecaphonic technique, since however radical a departure it represents, the organisation of the four parameters of pitch, rhythm, attacks, and dynamics in ‘Mode de valeurs’ is based on a free ordering of the component elements, without the constraints imposed by strictly serial procedures. Nonetheless, the piece had a profound influence on the younger generation of serial composers, to the extent that the three projected volumes of Boulez’s Structures were in effect both a homage to, and a critique of, ‘Mode de valeurs’, each book to be based in turn on the three pitch scales of Messiaen’s piece, but employed serially.

It unfortunately remains the case that the works of this brief period of multiple serialism are analysed much more frequently than they are performed, and for the good reason that they present seemingly intractable problems. On one level, performance of a work that specifies a duration, mode of attack, and dynamic for each individual note ought to be relatively unproblematic. After all, the composer’s intentions have been indicated unequivocally in seemingly unsparing detail. Furthermore, Stadlen’s concern for authenticity, rooted in a direct connection with a performing tradition, is taken to a new level by the availability of recordings involving the composer as executant in his own music. All in all, the aspiring performer of contemporary music is seemingly endowed with an unprecedented richness of source material on which to base an interpretation, and yet this plethora of information is a somewhat mixed blessing. Turning to Messiaen’s own recording of ‘Mode de valeurs’, the playing time is a fairly sedate 3′52″, and his performance is a valuable document, not only for his exemplary playing, but for the numerous (almost inevitable) inconsistencies with his own notational exactitude. Equally fascinating are the timings of recordings by two pianists most associated with Messiaen, who worked closely with the composer – Yvonne Loriod (3′25″) and Michel Béroff (2′37″). Leaving aside for a moment the considerable interpretive differences between these performances, notwithstanding the unparalleled precision of the markings, the discrepancies in timing alone are startling – the small-scale equivalent of comparing recordings of a classical symphony of half an hour (Béroff) and forty minutes duration (Messiaen). Given such discrepancies, how is one to approach the music of the period of multiple serialism in pursuit of an ‘authentic’ performance?

The word ‘pointillist’ is frequently (and misleadingly) appropriated as a generic description for the instrumental works of the post-war period, prompted by the visual appearance of scores comprised of a succession of seemingly self-sufficient sounds coalescing into a whole. The paintings of the pointillist group are notable for their dazzling use of timbre, with a constantly fluctuating use of tiny variations of colour as the tones gradually merge. An equivalent representation of such variations of timbre is impossible within the boundaries of musical notation, and this limitation is both a reminder of the provisional status of a written score, and an important factor to bear in mind when seeking to come to terms with scores seemingly already overloaded with performance indications. In the case of ‘Mode de valeurs’, the opening note, E♭, appears in the top part with its register, dynamic (ppp), and mode of attack (legato) unchanged throughout the entire piece. Yet the context in which this note is heard is constantly changing and, although Messiaen for the most part avoids direct clashes, the pitch inevitably takes on a different character and an individual pianistic colour according to its context: in other words, the performer may perfectly justifiably feel the necessity to adjust the dynamic level according to context – when, for example, it appears against the background of a resonating fff B♭ in the bass on the second page, or is sounded directly against a forte C♮ in the middle register at the top of the penultimate page. Rather than being censured as transgressions, such adjustments, whether of dynamics, methods of attack, or almost undetectable changes of timing, are a means of realising the expressive character of the music, and as such are in the tradition of Webern’s annotations in the Variations for Piano. That the piece is subject to quite varied approaches, even by those artists who have a claim to work within a direct and authentic tradition, is no more than an illustration of the role of the individual interpreter in observing the spirit, rather than the strict letter communicated by the score.

On 4 May 1952, Messiaen joined with the composer to give the premiere of the first piece of Boulez’s two-piano work, Structures – a public demonstration of rapprochement, following a period of cool artistic and personal relations between master and former student. In an interview some two years before his death in 2016, Boulez was asked about his approach as a performer to Structure Ia, and his reply began: ‘Well, let me say that it should be as anonymous as possible’ (Reference O’HaganO’Hagan 2017: 329). Although it is likely that Boulez was thinking of the French anonyme in the sense of ‘impersonal’ rather than the exact transliteration of the word, his words fail to address the notational challenges posed by the score when one attempts an interpretation of the piece. The strict application of serial technique to all the musical parameters, with comparatively restricted creative intervention by the composer, results in a series of conundrums for the performer. Even assuming that it is possible to apply twelve distinct dynamic gradations consistently throughout the piece, the operation of serial processes results in a series of notational contradictions. Thus, the extreme dynamic ppp appears throughout one section (bb. 86–97) with the value of a semiquaver and articulated by means of an accent and staccato dot. Whilst it might well be possible to observe the duration and dynamic level for each note, it is virtually impossible to realise these elements in combination with the articulation as marked: because of the wide difference in register between the various pitches, a note in the low bass register will inevitably have much greater resonance than one in the upper treble. The problems with a literal interpretation are multiplied when one considers the ensemble aspects of the piece: at bar 94 in the same passage, the ppp bass A♮ in Piano II coincides with a forte bass F♮ in Piano I. Clearly, for both pitches to be audible, some adjustments will need to be made in the interests of balance. A striking characteristic of the piece, despite its mechanistic elements, is the extent to which the two pianos engage in dialogue, with numerous instances of repetition of pitches and echo effects, especially in the central Lent section. The constant interplay of tritones between the two instruments is an invitation to engage spontaneously in performance with these spatial effects – and notwithstanding the exigencies of notational exactitude, the precise timing and dynamic level of these exchanges is likely to vary in different acoustics and according to the resonating characteristics of the instruments available. An eminently practical musician himself, Boulez as performer was certainly aware of such variables, evidenced by his own performances of Structures, notable for their fidelity to the spirit of the music, if not always for their textual exactness.

Just two months prior to the premiere of Structure Ia, Boulez received a visit from Karlheinz Stockhausen, the beginning of a friendship which endured throughout the coming decade, despite an increasing divergence of artistic aims. The first and fourth pieces of Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke I–IV were written in the aftermath of this visit and, in them, he takes rhythmic proportions to a new level of complexity. These instrumental works of the post-war decade are inextricably linked with the early development of electronic music, with its possibilities for precise measurement of each of the musical components. Unfortunately, the transfer of such precision to the field of instrumental writing can lead to intractable performance problems. No less a figure than Boulez himself expressed reservations about the practicality of such rhythmic complexity – a comment perhaps influenced by the necessity for a revised version of the vertiginously complex rhythms of the second piece of his Structures (Ib) prior to its first performance. By the following year, Stockhausen’s rigorous approach was beginning to shift as he gained experience in the practicalities of sound projection:

This heightened awareness of the practicalities of sound production is apparent in the next group of instrumental works, beginning with the six piano pieces, Klavierstücke V–X, started in 1954 but not finally completed until 1961. Despite the extended timescale of composition and their varied character, all the pieces were originally generated from a single series, with the various musical parameters derived from it. Whilst the detailed markings of dynamics and attack remain formidably demanding for the performer, the complexity of rhythmic proportions found in the first set of piano works has been considerably reduced. Although the absence of bar lines (except in Klavierstück IX) is discouraging at first sight, in some of the pieces in the cycle the rhythms can be grouped into quaver units for the purpose of learning, and a regular pulse felt throughout – especially so in numbers V and VIII. A notational innovation in Klavierstück VI is the addition of a scale of graduations of tempo notated above each system of the score, replacing the notational rigours of Klavierstücke I and IV with a more practical approach to the minute adjustments of tempo which occur spontaneously in every performance. In the case of Klavierstück X, the procedure is taken a stage further with the use of ascending and descending beams as a means of indicating flexibility of tempo. The fundamental importance of these indications of rhythmic ebb and flow to the conception of the piece is confirmed by the existence of a sketch which draws a complete map of the durations and rhythmic patterns complete with connecting beams, as in the final score, but without the accompanying pitches. Since the composer stipulates a fluctuation within the ratio 3:2 for the subordinate duration values, the performer has a degree of latitude within the basic tempo. This freedom appears to be diminished by the daunting injunction to play literally ‘as fast as possible’. However, a basic tempo can be discovered within the piece, and one possible solution is found on page 28 of the published score: a rapidly repeated D♮ is notated as which equals the overall value of a crotchet. Taking a cue from the opening demisemiquaver, the eight rapid repetitions of this first group provide a basic crotchet pulse, which can be modified during the course of the piece within the limits of the 3:2 ratio. Before leaving Klavierstück X, mention should be made of one of the most striking features of the work, the employment of clusters of varying densities – a characteristic which links it more closely than any of the preceding Klavierstücke with the sound-world of the electronic studio and the recently completed masterpiece, Kontakte. Far from being an invitation to produce a cacophony of indeterminate sounds, the clusters are calculated in their density and exactly notated in range: clusters in fourths, played by the wrist, and frequently accompanied by glissandi; ninths, employing the full span of the hand; and three densities which require the use of the arm – an octave-and-a-half, two octaves, and two-and-a-half octaves. Whilst it is the case that there is a degree of imprecision built into the notation, in that it is physically impossible to sound every single note in a large cluster, nonetheless, they can be balanced, and even given a melodic shape. Stockhausen gives each cluster or cluster-group a dynamic marking, often exploiting the delicate effects possible at the p to pp level. The long resonating pauses which punctuate the piece invite the listener to enter the interior of the sound, with the gradual emergence of the next section as the harmonics fade into silence. Klavierstück X marks the end of an era in Stockhausen’s career, being virtually the last fully notated work for a decade, and his last solo piano composition until the group of pieces derived from the operatic cycle, Licht, began to appear during the 1980s.

Meanwhile, any hegemony developing around the post-war serial composers was being undermined by both internal and external forces. Boulez’s continued expansion of serial possibilities by means of the technique of chord multiplication eventually led him to generate chordal aggregates of the entire chromatic field, to the extent that any fundamental relation to Schoenbergian principles of dodecaphonic ordering of the series was lost – in effect, a return to free atonality, epitomised by the freedom of the writing in the second piece of the second book of Structures (1961). This crisis of serialism occurred just a few years after the indeterminate compositions of John Cage and his followers began to receive serious attention in European musical circles – the invitations to Donaueschingen in 1954 and Darmstadt in 1958 being landmark occasions in the gradual integration of Cage’s innovations into the European musical mainstream. Whilst indeterminacy as a compositional philosophy is on one level at the opposite pole from multiple serialism, each composer would react in his own characteristic way to this encounter. Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI, apparently conceived in 1956, but not completed until the following year, represents his embrace of the challenge, with the published score consisting of a random ordering of the nineteen groups – although the evidence from the sketches suggests that some of the groups were conceived in a numerical sequence. Details of tempo, attacks, and dynamic levels are indicated at the end of each group and are applied to the next group, likewise chosen at random. The practicalities of realising this in performance are considerable, and a strategy which involves a pre-performance shuffling of the groups both preserves the concept of random ordering and allows precious preparation time for the adjustments to the various musical parameters, as dictated by the sequence of groups.

Boulez’s more cautious response in the Third Sonata (1957–63) introduced the principle of performer choice – ‘plugging the performer back into the creative circuit’, as he put it (Reference Boulez and ThéveninBoulez 1991j: 37) – whilst maintaining a considerable degree of control over the formal parameters. A surprising feature of the two published movements of this work is that, far from the introduction of some flexibility of structure being paralleled by a relaxation of serial principles, the techniques are applied with as much rigour as in the early works, with the central movement ‘Constellation’ involving all forty-eight forms of the series. Even the use of the sustaining pedal is subject to serial principles, with three methods of attack identified and rotated – sustained, staccato, and one producing harmonics, each of which may in turn be modified by pedal. The first generation of performers who worked with Boulez noted his emphasis on these effects of resonance rather than any commentary on the issue of performer choice (personal communication with Leonard Stein and Charles Rosen). It may be observed here that Boulez’s fanatically precise notation has to be interpreted in spirit rather than strictly according to the letter: needless to say, individual pianos differ considerably in the play of the sustaining pedal, and the effects of resonance are subject to such variables as quality of piano and acoustic properties of the venue – bearing in mind that the acoustics themselves can be disconcertingly altered by the presence of an audience. As always, a degree of practical adjustment in performance is perfectly reasonable, especially within the ‘Points’ sections of ‘Constellation’, where the resonances of individual harmonics can be lost without some discreet adjustment. More problematic is the introduction of a degree of performer choice in the ordering of the sections, all of which must nonetheless be played. This clearly presented Boulez himself with challenges as a performer – not dissimilar in practical terms to those of Klavierstück XI – and in fact the three privately available recordings of Boulez himself playing ‘Constellation’ maintain the same ordering of sections in each case, paralleling David Tudor’s practice of using an identical realisation of Cage’s score from performance to performance. Even more problematic is the choice available to the performer in the other published movement, ‘Trope’. Here, Boulez varied the ordering of the four sections in his recorded performances but played all of the optional passages in the two sections ‘Parenthèse’ and ‘Commentaire’. As I have shown elsewhere, the logic of this lies in the highly sophisticated use of related series to act as inserted commentaries throughout these two sections (Reference O’HaganO’Hagan 2017: 211–15). It could thus be argued that whilst an authentic performance could involve an omission of some (or even all) of the parenthetical sections in accordance with the composer’s instructions, an awareness of the richness of the compositional process would inhibit one from doing so. Ultimately then, it is the performer’s decision, but a decision hopefully based on an informed choice, bearing in mind the role of the commentaries within the framework of the overall structure. The novel published format of these and some other works of this period disguises the fact that the same interpretive principles apply to them as to the other music of the post-war era: that it is the interpreter’s role to choose between the available options in order to present the most convincing interpretation of the composer’s intentions, whilst remaining mindful of the paradox that one route to greater interpretive freedom lies in an enhanced understanding of the complexities of the compositional process.

The frame of this discussion is a mere forty years or so, encompassing the ‘classical’ phase of dodecaphonic technique. Yet within that limited period, the stylistic range is enormous, and the challenge, as always, remains that of interpreting the intentions of the composer with fresh insight within the context of a performing tradition. That interpretations of the same work can vary so much not only between individuals, but from performance to performance by the same individual, is a reflection not only of the elusiveness of the pursuit of an authentic interpretation, but a continuing affirmation of the multifaceted nature of a work of art, and its constant capacity for self-renewal as the performer aspires to an ever-deepening understanding of its musical essence. As Boulez expressed it: ‘The great works, happily, never cease to reimburse the inviolable darkness of their perfection’ (Reference Boulez and ThéveninBoulez 1991d: 145).

Back in the 1980s, Carl Dahlhaus wrote of the ‘post-serial’ as a ‘Verlegenheitsvokabel’ – a stopgap, a makeshift term (Reference Dahlhaus, Danuser, Hinrichsen and PlebuschDahlhaus 2007: 517). Four decades on, and roughly six since its probable coinage, it arguably still is. As Charles Jencks has noted, categories prefaced by a ‘post-’ tend to have in common ‘the liberating potential of their prefix, the desire to go beyond what were perceived as constricting dogmas’ (Reference JencksJencks 1987: 12). Yet in this case one might reasonably ask ‘liberation from what?’, in that the stem word seems to pose as many problems as the prefix. A durable definition of the post-serial, in other words, would surely require a more stable notion of serialism itself than the current (lack of) critical consensus allows, the intervening half-century of composition and scholarship having, if anything, complicated rather than clarified the picture. The purpose of this chapter is therefore less to legislate on the question of the post-serial than to explore the expanded field of composition that caused it to arise – those protean metamorphoses of the serial over the twentieth century’s final decades that went beyond the technical to embrace a renewed understanding of aesthetics and of serialism’s (albeit infrequently debated) ramifications for style.

Verlegenheit is also a word for ‘embarrassment’, and the use of the terminological fig leaf of the post-serial seemed allied to the embarrassment of two parties in particular. First, scholars, unsure not only of what the ‘serial’ now signified but also of which works fitted that definition, stubbornly as many of them resisted analysis. So many scores were not demonstrably serial, yet at the same time not demonstrably not serial either. Second, there was reticence on the part of composers, whose own ‘embarrassment’ reacted seemingly to charges – from both conservatively minded critics and intellectual fellow-travellers such as Theodor Adorno (Reference Adorno and LeppertAdorno 2002) – of a myopic over-preoccupation with technique. Even those inclined to offer technical accounts of their music frequently did so in ways that threw scholars off the scent. A point of reference for both Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez was the ‘burrow’ of Franz Kafka’s eponymous tale, a metaphor for not only the impenetrable construction of the work itself but also the composer’s workshop as a secret hideaway, whose inhabitant alone possesses ‘minute knowledge of all the paths and directions’ (Reference KafkaKafka 2017: 184; cf. Reference Berio and De BenedictisBerio 2013a: 237; Reference BoulezBoulez 1986c: 145–6). Composers thus distanced themselves from the appearance of excessive formalism, which left them free to pass their own judgement on constructivist excesses, in language occasionally redolent of serialism’s more reactionary detractors. Boulez mocked the ‘maniacal inanity’ (Reference Boulez and ThéveninBoulez 1991b: 16) of his own early forays into multi-parametric serialism and often spoke in later life of serialism in the past tense, despite his music’s ongoing dependence on serial routines. Berio, for his part, asked why, since composers seemed willing to serialise anything, they chose notes and not ‘eggs, coat buttons, a trip to Venice, horoscopes or Coca-Cola bottles’ (Reference FaureFaure 1962: 136).

Read in their fuller context, these statements stop short of a wholesale disavowal of serial construction. Still, such scathing polemics led some to grasp the wrong end of the stick, leaping to the conclusion that the composers concerned had jettisoned such procedures entirely. Lacking the means to confirm or falsify their assumptions, more and more commentators prematurely closed the chapter on serialism altogether. One such figure in the anglophone sphere was Reginald Smith Brindle. His book The New Music recounted how, after ‘Integral Serialism’ had reached ‘a peak of rationalization in the Fifties’, ‘liberalizing processes set in’, giving rise to what he termed ‘free twelve-tone music’, in which ‘the series is abandoned and note orders are completely free’ (Reference Smith BrindleSmith Brindle 1975: 53). Indeed, he viewed this phenomenon as ‘a logical continuation of the “free atonalism” that evolved in the years prior to the First World War’, such that the process went full circle: from ‘free atonalism … around 1910’, to twelve-note serialism in 1923, to post-war integral serialism and then back to revived ‘aspects of the early “free atonalism”’. Serialism had therefore ‘come and gone’ – this, in his view, by around 1960 – albeit ‘leaving decisive and lasting traces of its sojourn’ (Reference Smith BrindleSmith Brindle 1975: 53).

Over recent decades, however, manuscripts of post-Second World War composers, made available in such archives as the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, have revealed how exaggerated such rumours of serialism’s demise mostly were. While the uses to which twelve-note series were put had radically changed, they still lurked in the background of works by composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, and Berio through the 1960s and beyond. And if these rows seldom manifested themselves as linear unfoldings on the music’s surface, such had already been the case in many works of the 1950s, which saw series either subjected to such radical permutation as to make them unrecognisable or else supplanted by ‘secondary structures’ derived from them. The series, to use a locution Boulez borrowed from Henri Michaux, had become both ‘centre and absence’ (see Reference BoulezBoulez 1986b).

At the same time, it was not just composers’ ‘freedom’ from serial notions after 1960 that tended to be overstated. Exaggerated too was the ‘strictness’ with which composers were said to have worked prior to that date. Notions of the straitjacketed rigidity of ‘integral serialism’ or ‘total serialism’ are ubiquitous, but even those works regularly hauled out to demonstrate extreme degrees of ‘automatism’, principally Karel Goeyvaerts’s Sonata for Two Pianos (1950–1) and Boulez’s Structure Ia (1951), contain elements that elude that organisation, namely the note order within the seven-note groupings in the Goeyvaerts and the pitch register and polyphonic density of the series forms in the Boulez (see Reference PiencikowskiPiencikowski 1997; Reference Decroupet and BorioDecroupet 2003b). Given that historians have struggled to adduce further examples of ‘total organisation’, it would appear that Smith Brindle’s ‘peak of rationalization’ had been, for all that, barely a molehill.

The idea that the serial as a category might be more flexible and capacious than was previously thought could appear to render any notion of the ‘post-serial’ redundant. This was certainly the view of Stockhausen, for whom talk of ‘a “post-serial” phase’ meant ‘simply that the music of recent years sounds different from in the fifties, and since [writers on music] have no understanding of the music of the fifties, other than that it was “serial music”, so today’s music must therefore be “post-serial”. Is that not terribly banal?’ (Stockhausen 1978a: 550). Stockhausen’s contention that ‘post-serial’ was, for some, a mere chronological marker – the ‘serial’ 1950s, the ‘post-serial’ 1960s – was not without justification (witness the title given to the Dahlhaus text, ‘The Post-Serial Decade’, quoted at the start of this chapter). For others, meanwhile, it was more of a generational notion, the idea of a first wave of serialists (figures active in the early 1950s, such as Boulez, Nono, Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, and Bruno Maderna) succeeded by a later, ‘post-serial’ generation (Sylvano Bussotti, Franco Evangelisti, Mauricio Kagel, and György Ligeti) – though ‘later’ in terms less of the age of the composers (Ligeti and Evangelisti were senior to Stockhausen) than of their belated entry into serial circles. Still, Stockhausen’s problem with the post-serial was more that it took insufficient account of the transformations wrought within serialism itself. Those transformations had been technical, concerned with compositional material and bound up with both the quantitative and the qualitative aspects of sound. But they had been aesthetic too, marking a shift from ‘a hierarchical thinking in all areas of music’ to ‘an extended serial thinking’ that would preserve ‘an equality of all the elements in a composition and yet respect the law of natural distinctions’ (Stockhausen 1978a: 550). And to those considerations of technique and aesthetic one could perhaps add a third, invoking a category that was often taboo in serial circles, namely style.

If serialism is a technique, in other words, how should it be defined? Should its object be a note row, or might it use any permutable set or scale of values – and, indeed, an independent scale of values for each ‘parameter’ or dimension of sound? And if that scale no longer involved discrete quanta, might it be conceived less as a scale and more as a continuum?

If, at the same time, serialism is regarded as an aesthetic, is it an aesthetic of control or, rather, of unpredictability and openness? Does it involve a narrow and exclusive kind of material that seeks to sever connections with past music or a broad, inclusive aesthetic that can potentially embrace any material whatsoever?

Serialism has generally been considered not to constitute a style in itself but rather to be capable of accommodating different stylistic tendencies. Questions of style have therefore found themselves marginalised in most discussions of serial music. But did serial music of the 1950s create, in spite of itself, a set of stylistic idiosyncrasies? And might such stylistic features then find themselves deployed in the absence of any rigorous technique?

All these questions retain their relevance to the various metamorphoses that serialism underwent between the late 1950s and the early 1980s, and further beyond. While the music discussed in this chapter may count as ‘serial’ to some but already ‘post-serial’ to others, much of it involves at some level the prising apart of serialism’s technical, aesthetic, and ‘stylistic’ dimensions – dimensions that had at least appeared congruent at the start of the 1950s, however much they were already beginning to drift apart.

Generalising the Serial

While designations such as ‘integral serialism’, ‘multiple serialism’, and ‘total serialism’ have held sway in the anglophone literature, ‘generalised serialism’ was the term favoured by such figures as Boulez and Pousseur. For them, the nomenclature was not incidental. Just as Newtonian mechanics, broadly speaking, sits as a special case within the post-Einstein universe, so Schoenberg’s twelve-note technique came to be seen, even by as orthodox a Schoenbergian as René Leibowitz, as a subspecies – a ‘special case’ – within a wider field of generalised possibilities (Reference LeibowitzLeibowitz 1947: 127). Boulez, in his notorious ‘anti-obituary’ to Schoenberg, wrote of how one might ‘generalize the serial principle to the four constituents of sound: pitch, duration, dynamics/attack and timbre’ (Reference Boulez and ThéveninBoulez 1991f: 214). But this was to be no mechanical transfer of the twelve-note principle onto other dimensions. Rather, every assumption inherited from the Second Viennese School would now come in for systematic interrogation.

First of all, why twelve tones? By the time Boulez wrote that ‘serial thinking can at last escape the number twelve’ (Reference Boulez and ThéveninBoulez 1991 g: 177), others had already been questioning the necessity or sufficiency of a continuous circulation of all twelve notes, among them Milton Babbitt with his notion of ‘combinatoriality’ and Pousseur in his observations on Webern’s ‘organic chromaticism’. Babbitt saw as a necessary condition of aggregate formation in Schoenberg not just the use of a single ‘set’ or row but rather the use of ‘areas’ consisting of (usually four) sets with combinatorial, and hence aggregate-completing, properties (see Reference Babbitt, Dembski and StrausBabbitt 1987b: 52). By contrast, Pousseur, observing how the polyphonic treatment of note rows frequently involves the ‘premature’ repetition of pitch classes, suggested that it was chromatic intervallic relationships within the texture (and especially their ability to divert attention from octave relationships) that would ensure the harmonic integrity of the resulting texture, regardless of the completeness of the aggregate (see Reference PousseurPousseur 1955). Indeed, for Babbitt the hexachord was just as critical to the system’s potentialities as the twelve-note ‘set’ itself. And just as Schoenberg himself had experimented back in the 1920s with ‘tones of a motive’ of varying lengths, so composers’ scales of values came to vary widely, from as few as four (the first of Stravinsky’s Shakespeare Songs, 1954) or seven (Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, 1955–6) to as many as thirteen (Berio’s Nones, 1954, and Stockhausen’s Mantra, 1970).

Second, why twelve tones – in other words, giving priority to pitch? According to Boulez, Schoenberg’s technique had been ‘one-sided’ in neglecting rhythm, dynamics, and mode of attack (Reference Boulez and ThéveninBoulez 1991f: 213). And before long, the possibility arose of conceiving of still further ‘parameters’, individual dimensions of sound that could be isolated and classified for the purposes of serial manipulation. But one should not therefore assume, as many textbook accounts do, that ‘integral serialism’ necessarily involved a systematic organisation of each and every parameter, let alone the simple extrapolation onto other parameters of a twelve-element ordering unfolded in a linear, note-by-note fashion. While Structure Ia, for instance, has sets of twelve values for each of the four parameters, only those for pitch and duration unfold in such a way: those for dynamics and mode of attack are applied instead to entire twelve-note statements (of pitch–duration).

But a third question – equally crucial from the perspective of the ontology of the series – concerned the operations to which a series could be subjected and yet still retain its essential identity. Schoenberg had memorably compared the twelve-note row to a hat, equally recognisable from above or below or from left or right (Erwin Stein, in Reference BuschBusch 1985: 7). Its ‘shape’ (or at least its potential for such shape when actualised in register) depended on what Babbitt called the ‘interval-preserving operations’ (Reference Babbitt, Dembski and StrausBabbitt 1987b: 22) – the ‘canonical’ Schoenbergian transformations of transposition, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion – with rows equivalent under those operations deemed to be members of the same ‘row class’ (Reference MorrisMorris 1987: 114). Boulez’s handling of the pitch-class series in Structure Ia was ‘interval-preserving’ in this way, despite the complex polyphonic interweaving of series forms. But traceable in his sketches from 1952 (and anticipating its use in the ‘Bourreaux de solitude’ cycle of Le Marteau sans maître, 1952–5) is a more radical technique, which Stockhausen referred to as ‘modulo permutation’ or ‘zweites Permutation’ (see Reference Decroupet, Borio and DanuserDecroupet 1997: 334) and made use of himself, including at the opening of Kontra-Punkte (1952–3) (Reference MoschMosch 1997). This process involved ‘translating’ pitch-class intervals into order-number intervals and applying these order displacements individually to each note of the row. Both Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono had been employing similar permutational procedures as early as 1951 but using numerical displacement factors other than those of pitch-class interval (such as the Fibonacci number sequences used by Nono in Canti per 13, 1954–5) (see Reference Borio, Borio, Morelli and RizzardiBorio 2004: 102–3). These procedures served to ‘scatter’ the original row, sundering its note-to-note intervallic relationships. What resulted was not just multiple rows of different ‘row classes’ but rows that were (again to use set-theoretic terminology) partially ordered (see Reference 385LewinLewin 1976), in that the individualised ‘moves’ of pitch classes could leave certain order positions empty and others occupied by more than one note – a row, in other words, of ‘variable density’ incorporating dyads, trichords, and (especially after any further iteration of the process) potentially larger sets. In a ‘row’ that is the product of modulo permutation, therefore, the singleton pitch classes will appear in a given order, but where a position contains more than one note, those pitch classes can occur in any order. Neither partial ordering itself (evident, for instance, in Schoenberg’s treatment of the trichords of the row as freely ordered groupings in Ode to Napoleon op. 41) nor transformations outside the Schoenbergian ‘canon’ of row-class operations were especially new. Notable especially are the permutational procedures used by Alban Berg in his opera Lulu (1929–35), which left their mark on a composer like Hans Werner Henze (see Reference Kovács, Borio and DanuserKovács 1997c: 41), and Eimert’s Quartverwandlung (or its inversion, the Quintverwandlung), which maps the chromatic scale (or a permutation thereof) onto the cycle of fourths or fifths (or a permutation thereof) (see Reference EimertEimert 1950: 28–31), an operation later formalised as M/MI by Robert Morris (Reference MorrisMorris 1987: 114). But the procedures now adopted by Boulez, Nono, and Stockhausen, which often involved the continuous application of further order displacements throughout the work, posed still more radical questions concerning the ontology of the series itself and, as such, seemed calculated less towards new conceptions of order than towards controlled disorder.

While some techniques focused on those radically disruptive forms of linear ordering, others put into question the dimension of that ordering. The ‘variable density’ row already blurred the distinction between horizontal and vertical dimensions, and now composers started to ask why a row should be ordered primarily in time rather than, for instance, in register. This strategy was discussed by Boulez in the essay ‘ … Near and Far’ (Reference Boulez and ThéveninBoulez 1991d: 154) and actualised in the third cycle of Le Marteau, though it was clear that such a ‘vertical’ ordering need in principle neither be serial in nature nor preclude temporal (horizontal) ordering, in terms of the entry points of pitches within the field. Indeed vertical dispositions of the twelve-note aggregate came to preoccupy composers whose music was not generally considered serial. Elliott Carter professed (Reference BernardBernard 1990: 201) to having created certain of his trademark all-interval twelve-note chords by vertically upending note rows from a published inventory of all-interval series (Reference Bauer-Mengelberg and FerentzBauer-Mengelberg and Ferentz 1965). The Polish composer Witold Lutosławski meanwhile produced his own catalogue of aggregate-generating interval patterns (see Reference Homma and SkowronHomma 2001), albeit inclined towards limited-interval rather than all-interval sequences (for instance, the alternating semitones and tritones of Musique funèbre, 1958). Though linear serial organisation as such remained an exception in his music, his twelve-note chords often resemble in their intervallic construction the fixed-register interval fields found in serial works of the period.

But probably the most radical moves of the 1950s involved seeing the row no longer as an ‘ordering’ at all but rather as a reservoir of possibilities. For Boulez, the series was to be viewed as ‘not an order of events, but a hierarchy’ (Reference Boulez and ThéveninBoulez 1991d: 149–50). Such hierarchical thinking might entail using the series ‘to formulate objects which, in their turn, can be the basis of serial generation’ (Reference BoulezBoulez 1971: 104). These ‘objects’ might be, for instance, the blocs sonores (‘sound blocks’, again unordered pitch-class sets) produced from the partitioning of the twelve-note row into note groups of different sizes (in the first cycle of Le Marteau permutable partitions of two, four, two, one, and three notes) which are then subject to ‘multiplication’ by transposing the notes of one ‘block’ onto another and combining the result. Not only can the individual notes of the resulting sets be disposed in a variety of ways – as lines, chords, or a hybrid of the two – but paths from one set to the next can take a variety of forms. The sets generated by multiplication therefore build on the intervallic characteristics of the original series, even if the latter itself can rarely be traced as a linear succession.

While Boulez’s ‘multiplication’ procedures may have been generalised from such phenomena as the transpositional combination of trichordal row-segments in Webern’s Second Cantata (1941–3), Stockhausen found a precedent in the same composer’s Concerto op. 24 (1931–4) for his notion of ‘group composition’ (see Stockhausen 1963c and 1963g). But whereas Boulez’s blocs sonores were not always articulated as discrete entities on the music’s surface, Stockhausen’s groups had a more striking profile phenomenologically, unified as they often were by common ‘group characteristics’, such as a single timbre, dynamic, or type of articulation. Whereas much post-war serial music had tended to feature constant contrasts in the various parameters, each note manifesting itself as an isolated entity (hence the term punktuelle Musik, ‘point music’), group characteristics were achieved by fixing one or more of the parameters for a longer span of time, applying a single quantum, for instance a dynamic value, not to a single note but to a composite element, a group of notes. As Stockhausen soon turned his attention from the ‘group’, the perceptible Gestalt, to the ‘mass’ – denser, swarm-like complexes in which it was impossible to make out individual notes and which lent themselves, rather, to characterisation in global, statistical terms – the domain over which a single parameter could prevail was considerably enlarged. Indeed the overlapping individual sections of Stockhausen’s Gruppen of 1955–7 (whose title refers more overtly to its three spatially separated orchestra groups) resemble masses more than groups, and their genesis illustrates another way of treating the series as a global formal determinant. Within the work’s fundamental scheme (derived from twelve successive fixed-register row forms), not only is each pitch frequency translated into a unit pulse to determine the tempos of the groups (and the frequency ratios used to determine their relative duration), but the pitch intervals of the sequence (read in retrograde) provide a notional bandwidth for successive groups, giving each a distinctive registral profile (see Reference MischMisch 1998). Pousseur’s Quintette à la mémoire d’Anton Webern (1955) likewise experiments with the interval as ‘bandwidth’, the successive intervals of the row (borrowed from Webern’s op. 22) ‘filled in’ to generate chromatic strings of varying lengths (see Reference Decroupet, Borio and DanuserDecroupet 1997: 347–54). But since these are treated not as chromatic clusters but as pitch classes freely distributed in register, the effect is heard in terms not of registral ambitus but rather of fluctuating textural density. In both works, nonetheless, the ontological identity of the series, as conceived by Schoenberg in terms of an ordered succession of pitch-class intervals, was yet again effaced by new, and here essentially statistical, considerations.

The Indeterminate Moment

This new orientation towards the statistical in Stockhausen’s music focuses one of the central issues in post-war metamorphoses of the serial: the role of aleator(ic)ism or indeterminacy. For decades, as M. J. Grant points out, the historiographical norm was to present indeterminacy as the antithesis of serialism, and composers as having supposedly performed ‘a U-turn by employing aleatoric methods from the mid-1950s’, prompted by encounters with the New York School and, in particular, John Cage’s 1958 visit to the Darmstadt New Music Courses (Reference GrantGrant 2001: 131). But, as both Grant and Martin Iddon have demonstrated (Reference IddonIddon 2013), such a version of events slights both chronology and significant commonalities of aesthetic. Both ‘aleatory’ (aléatoire, aleatorisch) and ‘indeterminate’ (indeterminé, unbestimmt) had entered the theoretical vocabulary of European music much earlier in the decade. Boulez and Cage had corresponded intensively from mid-1949 until the end of 1951, when Boulez declared himself ‘not happy with … the method of absolute chance (by tossing the coins)’ (Reference 390NattiezNattiez 2002: 193). Cage’s use of chance procedures to produce a score in fixed notation, the phenomenon Christian Wolff called ‘indeterminacy in respect to composition’ (Reference ClineCline 2019: 84), was slow to find imitators in Europe, whereas scores that left key decisions to the performer(s) – yet whose components could be, and often were, serially composed – started to emerge in the late 1950s. Perhaps the key aesthetic difference came down to Cage’s stated desire for a music ‘free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the literature and traditions of art’ (Reference CageCage 1961: 59). Freedom from memory and the past was one thing but freedom from ‘taste’ – an indifference to the sounding result – was, for some, a step too far. Even in Cage’s music during this period, the role of taste has arguably been underplayed, as the composer’s own auto-critique of his Music of Changes (1951) and Music for Piano (1952–6) testifies (Reference Pritchett, Fleming and DuckworthPritchett 1989: 256). Boulez, for his part, was clearly aware that his highly ramified serial processes could be as unpredictable in their consequences as chance operations – he acknowledged the presence of ‘the unknown’ in the ‘interpolations and interferences of different series’ (Reference 390NattiezNattiez 2002: 193) – but the deployment of their resultants in terms of register, Gestalt, and temporal succession was still informed by taste and judgement.

All music inevitably entails a certain margin of indeterminacy, and the serial experiences of the 1950s if anything intensified this awareness. As composers sought to quantify such elements as dynamics and mode of attack, and to subject rhythmic proportions to the minutest serial calculations, approximation on the part of human performers became inevitable, and the resulting indeterminacies of speed, duration, and coordination started to be openly embraced. Stockhausen’s Zeitmaße (1955–6) for wind quintet, as its title suggests, is concerned with tempos and their relativity. As in Gruppen, metronome speeds (at times different in each instrument) are precisely calculated, but the transitions between them (instructions to slow down and speed up) are left to the judgement and physical capabilities of the performers – their ability to play, for instance, at maximum speed or in a single breath. In the piano works of both Stockhausen and Boulez, the frequent use of agglomerations of grace notes (often resulting from the grafting of secondary serial structures onto primary ones) united with increasing considerations of resonance (the indeterminacy of a sound’s decay) to nurture the phenomenon that Boulez termed temps lisse (‘smooth time’, as opposed to temps strié, ‘striated time’), mostly captured in unmetered and/or proportional notation and coordinated by cues from conductor or fellow performers (Reference BoulezBoulez 1971: 93–94; see also Reference GoldmanGoldman 2011: 12–13).

Even in the domain of electronics, where precise quantification was sought down to the microstructure of individual sounds, such absolute determinacy had proved an impossibly elusive goal. Indeterminacy therefore began to enter all manner of discourses surrounding the compositional process. Stockhausen’s ‘mass’ textures in Gruppen and Carré (1959–60) – textures whose individual notes (let alone their ordering) were imperceptible – not only made unavoidable the language of ‘fuzziness’ and approximation (terms such as ‘on average [durchschnittlich], predominantly [vorwiegend] … approximately [annährend]’) but would also, Stockhausen asserted, ‘allow us to speak of statistical form’ (Stockhausen 1963f: 77). In producing such dense textures, should composers use serial procedures (much as their consequences might be inaudible), should they resort (as would Iannis Xenakis) to probabilistic or statistical calculation, or should they leave the ordering to some degree to the performers’ discretion? That last possibility stimulated numerous manifestations of ‘limited aleatoricism’ in both serial and non-serial works. Berio, in the final section of Tempi concertati (1958) and the third movement of Circles (1960), experimented with varied notations in the context of proportional spacing. These included boxed configurations in which the notes can be ordered at will, as well as the soon-to-be-ubiquitous ‘wavy line’, indicating ad libitum repetition. That latter notational device is also found in the rhythmically free sections of Lutosławski’s works of the 1960s onwards, in which the note order and rhythmic proportions of individual lines are specified but the coordination between them not. The contrast in Lutosławski’s works between ad libitum and strictly metered a battuta sections creates, arguably, another form of Boulez’s opposition between ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ time.

In Stockhausen’s first foray into open form in his Klavierstück XI (1956), the nineteen freely orderable units are fully, and indeed serially, composed out. Still, Stockhausen drew on his studio experiences, making the comparison with a sound or noise in which, as with instrumental ‘mass’ textures, ‘certain partials, components, are behaving statistically. … If I make a whole piece similar to the ways in which this sound is organized, then naturally the individual components of this piece could also be exchanged, permutated, without changing the basic quality’ (Reference CottCott 1974: 70). Boulez likewise used the studio analogy of ‘formants’ to characterise the five main components of his Third Piano Sonata (1955–7/1963), which he described as a ‘work in progress’ in the manner of James Joyce and which was to remain unfinished. Whereas in Klavierstück XI a player makes an instantaneous choice from the materials at hand, Boulez expected his performer to plan a route through the labyrinth (again, the reference to Kafka’s ‘Burrow’) (Reference BoulezBoulez 1986c: 148, 145). The essential scheme involved a central retrogradable formant (‘Constellation’) around which four others revolved; in the event, only the retrograde version (‘Constellation-Miroir’) was formally released for performance along with one other formant, ‘Trope’. The formants have further mobile elements: in the case of ‘Trope’ four subsections, of which two can be exchanged and the whole sequence performed in any circular permutation (a possibility facilitated by the ring-binding of the score). (The title of one of them, ‘Parenthèse’, refers literally to bracketed-off sections that can be either played or omitted.)

Spoken of in this way, the concept of formal mobility starts to seem less to do with ‘chance’ per se than ‘as a radicalisation of the serial principles of permutation and rotation’ (Reference BorioBorio 1993: 62), transplanted from the local to the global level. But it was also a manifestation of the inherently open-ended nature of serial thought – ‘a universe in continuous expansion’, to quote Boulez’s Fasquelle encyclopedia entry on the ‘series’ (Reference Boulez and ThéveninBoulez 1991c: 236) – which simply threw up more possibilities than could ever be contained within a single version of a single work. If composers like Boulez and Berio made progressively less use of indeterminate notation, increasingly aware of its impracticalities in performance, both shifted their preoccupation with openness to a different level. For Boulez, it went from the level of the work to his output as a whole: the alternative possibilities harboured within a conception like that of the Third Sonata (and there left to performer choice) could also be explored either in consecutive versions of the same work (again the Joycean work in progress) or else in material carried over from one work to the next. For Berio, meanwhile, ‘openness’ in the definition articulated by his friend and collaborator Umberto Eco (Reference Eco and RobeyEco 1989) remained an ideal for every work, albeit now in the sense less of a work ‘in movement’ than of one that permits a multi-perspectival reading and, in particular, interpellates the listener in an act of co-creation, not of the sounding reality as such but of its meanings and relationships.

While many composers’ further moves into indeterminacy and graphic notation eventually parted company with anything resembling serialism, with others serial preoccupations persisted – if, often, at little beyond surface level. Aldo Clementi’s Informel 3 (1963), while deriving all its pitch content from rows of twelve notes (albeit at times ‘defective’ series, i.e. incorporating pitch-class duplications), functions more in the nature of a graphic score. Its visual resemblance to an ‘all-over’ abstract expressionist painting has its sonic correlate in what Richard Toop called its ‘opaque but constantly shifting surface’, the intermittent gaps in its dense aggregates determined by amoeba or lozenge shapes drawn on its grid-like pages (Reference Toop, Cook and PopleToop 2004: 459; see also Reference BorioBorio 1993: 128–33). At the same time other forms of indeterminacy show the survival of parameter-based thinking, even in the absence of rows or sets of proportions. This was true of a work such as Dieter Schnebel’s Glossolalie (1960) for voices and instruments, whose materials, rather than defining the piece’s events, provide a ‘kit’ that specifies individual qualitative characteristics for the various ‘parameters’ (by no means restricted to the standard ones), which are then combined into events by the performers themselves (see Reference ZagorskiZagorski 2009; Reference BorioBorio 1993: 109–18). It was the case too for many of the process works of Stockhausen – Prozession (1967) and Kurzwellen (1968), for instance – where the plus, minus, and equal signs notated in the score reflect the modification of parameters such as pitch, dynamic, and duration, even though the works’ sound materials are themselves indeterminate.

Beyond the Serial?

Discussions about when the term ‘serial’ might start to lose its meaning altogether intensified around 1960. In 1959, Heinz-Klaus Metzger cast doubt on its appropriateness to works based on ‘the concept of groups’ (Reference MetzgerMetzger 1961: 25). A year later, György Ligeti, in his article ‘Compositional Tendencies Today’, suggested that the conception had ‘undergone such far-reaching changes, and the method itself been set in flux to such an extent that … one can scarcely still speak of serial composition in the original sense of the word’ (Reference Ligeti and LichtenfeldLigeti 2007b: 112). Ligeti was not yet attaching to this ‘new kind of music’ the label ‘post-serial’ – he would later do so (Reference LigetiLigeti 1983: 137) – but he nonetheless saw it as a phenomenon that ‘embodies both the serial conception and its disintegration and therefore stands beyond the serial [jenseits des Seriellen]’ (Reference Ligeti and LichtenfeldLigeti 2007b: 116).

‘Compositional Tendencies Today’ is perhaps more fully understood in light of the texts completed either side of it. An earlier article, ‘Metamorphoses of Musical Form’, had taken as its premise ‘the emergence of a shared new sense of musical form’ amongst ‘the various “serial” composers’ (Reference LigetiLigeti 1965: 5 [translation modified]; original reprinted as Reference Ligeti and LichtenfeldLigeti 2007c). Ligeti noted approvingly the way in which ‘group’-oriented serialism had diverted attention from the individual note to the ‘group’ and the ‘mass’ but saw that shift of focus from local ordering to global formal categories as a tacit acknowledgement of the self-negating quality of ever more complex serial determinations at a local level. He was by no means the first to have commented in such terms. Xenakis, in a 1954 article entitled ‘The Crisis of Serial Music’, had likewise remarked on how the polyphonic overlay of serially ordered lines tended towards a form of entropy, ‘an irrational and random dispersal of sounds across the entire extent of the sonic spectrum’ (Reference XenakisXenakis 1955: 3). And in this sense, both Xenakis and Ligeti were simply echoing the self-critiques of Boulez, Pousseur, and, especially, Stockhausen (Stockhausen 1963d: 170–1 and Reference Stockhausen1961: 79–80). But whereas those composers had seen their own evolving practices as consequential developments of serialism itself, for Ligeti they raised the possibility of abandoning serial technique altogether. Towards the end of ‘Metamorphoses’, he asked: ‘If serial determinations have already been shifted onto more global categories of form … why should serial manipulations be used at all? Couldn’t the form, in both its overall trajectory and all its details, be left completely to the unencumbered imagination?’ (Reference Ligeti and LichtenfeldLigeti 2007c: 94–5; Reference LigetiLigeti 1965: 12, translation modified).

At this juncture, Ligeti appeared to step back from that proposal: ‘such freedom would be false’ and, what is more, ‘a pre-formed network of possibilities and limitations’ allowed one to ‘compose more freely than in total independence’ (Reference Ligeti and LichtenfeldLigeti 2007c: 95; Reference LigetiLigeti 1965: 12, translation modified). A few years later, however, in a 1965 Darmstadt lecture on ‘Form in the New Music’, Ligeti now seemed to embrace it. Once form has been established on a global level, he now suggested, ‘relationships within the compositional process broadly coincide with those that appear in the composed music’. This in turn renders it possible to ‘forgo any ordering or manipulation according to pre-determined directives’, since ‘the primary given is not the compositional process, but the conception of the form in its totality, the imagination of the sounding music. … By eliminating any pre-formation, the musical imagination can surrender itself freely to the uncharted and the uncertain’ (Reference Ligeti and LichtenfeldLigeti 2007a: 199).

Ligeti’s appeal to the primacy of the conception of form recalls Adorno’s notion, formulated a few years earlier, of a musique informelle, a type of music that ‘has discarded all forms which are external or abstract or which confront it in an inflexible way’ and yet ‘should nevertheless constitute itself in an objectively compelling way, in the musical substance itself, and not in terms of external laws’ (Reference AdornoAdorno 1992: 272). But whereas Ligeti trumpeted his confidence in the power of the unfettered imagination to secure ‘the uncharted and the uncertain’ and hence effortlessly ‘conceive of the new’ (Reference Ligeti and LichtenfeldLigeti 2007a: 199), Adorno was more sceptical. According to him, composers faced a ‘double bind’ between on the one hand wilfully ignoring ‘the pattern of [their] own reactions’ and simply ‘labour[ing] away at the material to hand’ – which he saw as a surrender ‘to the philistinism of reified consciousness’ – and, on the other, depending on their ‘own spontaneous reactions’ and ignoring ‘the constraints of the principles of construction’ (Reference AdornoAdorno 1992: 278).

Indeed, the solutions Ligeti adopted in his own compositions were perhaps not as radically distanced from serial thinking as he would later claim (see Reference WilsonWilson 2004: esp. 9–12). The ‘preformation’ he was proposing to eliminate had neither been jettisoned altogether in his immediately preceding works nor would be in those that followed. The technique he dubbed ‘micropolyphony’, introduced in the second movement of Apparitions (1958–9) and developed extensively in Atmosphères (1961), was a form of canonic imitation dense in both its chromaticism and the closeness of its polyphonic entries. As such, it was comparable, at least in principle, to a Webernian canon and hence to all intents and purposes a serial technique, if anything stricter in its linear succession than much avowedly serial writing of the time. And those microcanonic techniques would continue through works of the 1960s, including the Requiem (1963–5) and Lontano (1967), albeit in less pervasively chromatic form. Xenakis, meanwhile, saw his move to stochastic organisation in works such as Pithoprakta (1955–6), its dense sound masses modelled on the statistical motions of gas particles, as a further generalisation of serial organisation, itself ‘a special case of stochastic thinking’ (Reference XenakisXenakis 1965: 36).

Crucial here is the question not only of the necessity of serial technique but also of whether that technique – multifarious as it had become – should be seen as an end in itself or rather the means to a fundamental transformation of musical material. Perhaps that renewal of material had already proved so radical and thoroughgoing that the ‘ladder’ that had enabled its attainment could now be kicked away. But to others such a view appeared complacent. If serial technique were to be regarded as dispensable and the imagination allowed simply to fall back onto intuition and habit, the ceaseless renewal of compositional material would then be brought to a standstill. The ‘stylistic’ traits of serial works as developed hitherto then simply become yet more material ‘ready at hand’ for use, or just slavish imitation, by composers, rather like those handed-down historical materials that serialism had purposely set out to elude. Ligeti himself, in the ‘Form’ lecture, had spoken of how ‘an inventory of types’, including ‘irregular leaps up and down in wide intervals … unbroken, persistent planes of sound with generally cluster-like internal organisation … delicate, bustling percussion activity bathed in vibraphone and bell sounds’ were now ‘so extensively ingrained that they have become as common as an authentic cadence once was’ (Reference Ligeti and LichtenfeldLigeti 2007a: 193). Serialism – or, if one preferred, post-serialism – might thus crystallise into code and into ‘style’, in a way that could be seen as either an inevitability of the historical process or a betrayal of serialism’s motivating, self-regenerating impulse. The latter was predictably the view taken by Adorno, for whom the spectre of epigonism now loomed larger than ever. He had previously noted how the expressionism of the Second Viennese School, once able to deal a genuine shock to its audience, had become ‘tame and impoverished’ at the hands of a younger generation of composers, namely Boulez, Goeyvaerts, and Stockhausen (Reference Adorno and LeppertAdorno 2002: 182). Now the music of that younger generation fell prey to the same risk, in that ‘conventions of expression [had] crystallized even in a language hostile to convention’, creating what he called a ‘second-degree conformism’:

From a present-day vantage point, the distance between Ligeti and those who willingly self-identified as serialists now seems less wide than it once did. It has become increasingly apparent that serialism was always about a balance of – or a compromise between – the rational and the empirical, however much it seemed weighted towards the rational side of the equation. Indeed, what Ligeti described in ‘Metamorphoses’ as the musical realisation retroactively modifying the precompositional plan (Reference Ligeti and LichtenfeldLigeti 2007c: 95) was no novelty, since such ‘expedient readjustment’, as Richard Toop called it, had been endemic to post-war serial practice from the start (Reference ToopToop 1985: 8). More striking in Ligeti’s ‘Form’ lecture than his rhetorical rejection of serialism (Adorno, after all, had proffered ‘a-serial music’ as a possible synonym for musique informelle) is the dramatic shift it signals towards empiricism. Doubtless this new confidence in empirical approaches stemmed in large part from experiences in the electronic studio. In their foreword to the first issue of Die Reihe, Eimert and Stockhausen had noted that the ‘relation to sound has never been as direct as it is today’ (Eimert and Stockhausen, quoted in Reference GrantGrant 2001: 88). The everyday ‘manual labour’ in the studio – cutting, splicing and synchronising tapes, modifying sound envelopes, filtering noise bands, and adjusting speed, dynamics, and resonance – allowed composers, in spite of the cumbersome nature of the technology, to sense a certain immediacy in the manipulation of sound. The way was now open for the tendency that became known variously as ‘texture music’, ‘timbre music’, or ‘sonorism’ – works that not infrequently made sporadic and eclectic use of serial devices but placed their focus rather on the distinctive qualities of texture that had often occurred as the by-products of serial procedures. Many of these works (some of which, like Lutosławski’s, made use of limited aleatoricism) developed highly sophisticated means of ordering and classifying timbres and textures, frequently drawing on parameter-based oppositions. Krzysztof Penderecki’s was one such system (see Reference MirkaMirka 2001); another was the inventory of ‘Sound Types of the New Music’ assembled by Helmut Lachenmann, a composer by no means unmindful of the potential cul-de-sac of a stylistic modernism (Reference LachenmannLachenmann 1970). But perhaps the avant-garde ideal of a complete tabula rasa – a music untainted by stylistic reminiscence – had always been an illusion. Ultimately, as Adorno himself was to put it in the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, ‘the complete negation of style seems to reverse dialectically into style’ (Reference AdornoAdorno 1997: 207).

The ‘Meta-serial’

By the 1960s, serialism as a concept had become increasingly elusive. To Gottfried Michael Koenig, it now signified ‘everything and nothing, and could almost be considered a world view’ (Reference 383Koenig and TazelaarKoenig 2018: 152). Meanwhile to Bruno Maderna what was ‘yesterday a grammatical system, a tool of organisation’ had become a state of mind, ‘a forma mentis’ (Reference MadernaMaderna 1965: 28). But for Pousseur, tasked with the ‘Serial Music’ entry for the Harvard Dictionary of Music, the challenge of definition was less easily evaded:

Conspicuously absent from Pousseur’s definition are those references to the twelve notes or to ‘ordering’ which the publication’s mainly anglophone readership would doubtless have expected. And the notion of serialism as a radical break with categories of tradition, however uncontroversial from a European perspective, differed radically from the views of American serialists, who saw themselves, in Babbitt’s words, as ‘the legitimate, if abandoned, children of the Schoenbergian revolution’ (Reference BabbittBabbitt 1973–4: 28) and hence (so the implication ran) the true inheritors of the European tonal tradition and its legacy. But what is more, Pousseur’s idea of distributing structural importance across ‘many (possibly all) elements of musical development’ hinted at a yet more ambitious stage in the generalisation of the serial concept, one that would be concerned with the ‘synthesis of elements traditionally considered antithetical’: ‘This new stage in the history of serial music will manifest itself in the increasing overthrow of a number of taboos (for example, prohibition of octaves) that serial composers originally felt obliged to establish. All kinds of material – both traditional and wholly new – will come to be used integrally’ (Reference Pousseur and ApelPousseur 1969: 769–70).

If Pousseur’s dictionary entry reflects more than anything his own current compositional preoccupations, it makes clear nonetheless how far and how fast serial music had travelled in less than two decades. For Stockhausen, Boulez, and others in the 1950s, serialism had been a way of guaranteeing materialgerechtes Denken – a conception of music that, by resisting (and insuring against) the temptation to fall back on instinct or spontaneous invention, would be free of reminiscences of past music (see Reference ZagorskiZagorski 2009: 296–8). But to an increasing number of composers, the lifting of taboos seemed desirable, especially those on consonance and on semantic and historical reference in general. Serialism could then become truly omnivorous, traversing the entire sonic spectrum and offering, in Berio’s words, ‘the chance to control a larger musical terrain’ (Reference Berio and Osmand-SmithBerio 1985: 64). At its most ambitious the vision was of a ‘system of systems’, in which different musics – running the whole gamut from the complex to the simple, from the dissonant to the consonant, and from the unfamiliar and unrecognisable to the familiar and recognisable – could be embraced and reconciled, a view variously expressed in political, ethical, and (in Stockhausen’s case especially) transcendental terms. In this way, as Richard Toop puts it, ‘purism gave way to pluralism’ (Reference Toop, Cook and PopleToop 2004: 454), but in ways that preserved key aspects of the serial thought of the previous decade: first, parameter-based thinking; second, the notion of a ‘scale’ of elements subject to permutation; and third, the possibility of reconceiving the ‘scale’ as an unbroken continuum that allowed gradual and scarcely perceptible transitions from one state to another.

While text had by no means been excluded from serial music of the early 1950s, it increasingly found itself drawn, in both its phonetic and its semantic aspects, into the domain of serial composition. A work such as Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–6) had been significant not only for bringing a ‘concrete’ element, in the form of a boy’s voice, into the domain of electronically generated sound, but also for its syllabic treatment of the Apocryphal text – an ‘insert’ between Daniel 3:23 and 3:24 – with vowels (as periodic sounds) and consonants (as aperiodic noise elements) placed at opposite ends of the acoustic continuum (see Reference Decroupet and UngeheuerDecroupet and Ungeheuer 1998). Berio, in a working discussion of his tape piece Thema – Omaggio a Joyce (1958–9), based on chapter 11 of Joyce’s Ulysses, talked of seeking a ‘gradual and continuous evolution’ based on the classification of vowel sounds in the text ‘according to a scale of vocal colours – a series in a certain sense – which extends from A to U, including the diphthongs’ (Berio 2013b: 260–1). In Circles, he brought a similar kind of analysis to bear outside the electronic domain, with alliterative processes explored between individual phonemes and instrumental sounds in ways analogous to the pitch-class repetitions and redundancies – themselves a form of alliteration – within the movement’s serial processes (see Reference Neidhöfer and De BenedictisNeidhöfer 2012).

Along with the incorporation of text and its associated phonetic materials into the compositional process came that of gesture. Dahlhaus notes the way in which Kagel’s ‘instrumental theatre’, with its aim to ‘regulate and highlight not so much the results of the sound as the actions of the players, can be understood as an extreme form of parameter-based thinking, which now also brought under its control the movements of the instrumentalists and their trajectories in space’ (Reference Dahlhaus, Danuser, Hinrichsen and PlebuschDahlhaus 2007: 520). Hence, gestures and actions are now as much ‘composed’ as other elements of the work, whether as autonomous ‘parameters’ in themselves, such as in the ‘main actions’ that are combined with ‘realisation forms’ in the 1962 theatrical version of Kagel’s Antithese (see Reference MikawaMikawa 2014: esp. 211–12), or mapped onto the values of more conventionally ‘musical’ parameters, as with the prayer gestures performed by dancer-mimes in Stockhausen’s Inori (1973–4). For Berio, on the other hand, the gesture was something latent and awaiting activation in the musical material itself – rather like the meaning that Adorno described as ‘history … migrated into music’ (Reference AdornoAdorno 1999c: 160). The way that instruments can be seen to carry embodied history is especially evident in Berio’s series of instrumental Sequenza pieces, composed over more than four decades. Sequenza XI for guitar (1987–8) incorporates flamenco and classical guitar traditions in an attempt to explore what the composer called ‘the passage between these two “histories”’ (Reference BerioBerio 1998: 20) while, harmonically speaking, articulating a continuum (by way of mostly semitone and whole-tone voice-leading) from the characteristic open-string sonority dominated by the perfect fourth to chords of greater harmonic and acoustic complexity.

This kind of continuum from simple to complex sometimes involved negotiating degrees of familiarity and recognisability, and hence the use of quoted material. In Hymnen (1966–9), Stockhausen took around forty of the world’s national anthems, splicing and recombining them to achieve varied degrees of defamiliarisation and intermodulating them to create scarcely perceptible transitions from one to the next. Stockhausen’s work on Hymnen coincided with Pousseur’s on his Votre Faust (1960–8), an elaborate ‘fantaisie variable, genre opéra’ which embodied his harmonic model based on two- and three-dimensional networks (‘réseaux’), akin to the Tonnetze of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century harmonic theory (see Reference PousseurPousseur 1968). The network of the tonal triad has as its axes the intervals of the octave, fifth, and third. Modifying those axes – for instance, turning the octave into a minor ninth, the fifth into a minor sixth, and third into a perfect fourth – produces harmony more characteristic of Webern, whose ‘multipolar’ harmonic fields constitute the ‘special case’ from which Pousseur’s system is generalised. The ‘technique des réseaux’ underpins the whole spectrum of harmonic transformation in Votre Faust. ‘La chévauchée fantastique’ (1964–5), for piano and ad libitum soprano (the central movement of the satellite work Miroir de Votre Faust), ‘modulates’ by means of a chronological sequence of quotations, from Gluck (via Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Wagner, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) to Pousseur himself, in what he termed an ‘imperceptible stylistic glissando’ (Reference Pousseur and DecroupetPousseur 2004: 331). This experiment would provide an influential precedent for a better-known collage of quotations, albeit assembled associatively rather than chronologically: the third movement of Berio’s Sinfonia (1968–9).

Pousseur’s orchestral work Couleurs croisées (1967), composed in the United States at a decisive moment in the civil rights movement, featured transformations of the protest anthem ‘We Shall Overcome’. Pousseur clearly envisaged his system of harmonic networks as serving a democratic inclusiveness and openness, ‘a richer musical expression, more complex and better adapted to the relativistic and pluralistic reality of today’ (Reference PousseurPousseur 1970: 247). But others might read something uncomfortably Hegelian and totalising into this notion of an all-englobing ‘metasystem’ capable of ‘interpreting, integrating and coordinating all known musical systems’ (Reference PousseurPousseur 1970: 290). Such wide-ranging ambitions were nowhere clearer than in Stockhausen’s Licht (1977–2003), a cycle of seven operas for the days of the week lasting almost thirty hours. But, daunting as the scale of the project and its cosmic subject matter was, its serial elements are arguably nothing like as opaque to the listener as those in Stockhausen’s works of the 1950s. Central to the cycle is the ‘formula’, which goes beyond the note row in both specificity and intelligibility (see Reference KohlKohl 1990). Most of Stockhausen’s formulae use all twelve notes, but typically as a sequence of registrally specific pitches, at times incorporating repeated notes in the same or different octaves (and even the occasional octave leap). Since the formula not only has a clear melodic contour but also incorporates rhythmic values (including rests), it is far closer to an actual melody than a Schoenbergian note row, and while it serves long-range structural functions as well, it is recognisable as a ‘theme’ on a local level too, aided by its generally moderate-to-slow pace of unfolding. In the later music of Berio, too, the seeming relaxation of harmonic tension is due less to a reduction in the pervasiveness of the twelve notes than to their entry over a longer timespan, in a manner that allows each note and each interval to be registered individually. A case in point is the orchestral Requies (in memoriam Cathy Berberian) (1983–5), with its long, selectively sustained melody, which one by one unfolds the notes of a fixed-register twelve-note pitch field over the first twenty bars. Even Boulez, whose harmonic language and gestural idiom had changed far less since the late 1950s, was moving increasingly towards a greater concern with the local articulation of gestures, the use of referential sonorities (at times analogous to pitch centres), and the priorities of perception in general (see Reference GoldmanGoldman 2011: esp. 63–70).

Conclusion

By the end of the twentieth century, the totalising and universalising discourse in which serialism was often cloaked may have seemed dated, if not out-and-out hubristic. But undeniable at least was the way serialism had broken out in numerous different directions. Some composers were now using quasi-serial techniques in the context of a considerably transformed aesthetic and style, others were exploring the aesthetic consequences of combining autonomous parameters of sound and action, while still others continued to operate through the stylistic medium of a late-modernist soundworld without recourse (or, at least, acknowledged recourse) to serial techniques. Meanwhile the term ‘post-serial’ continued to be used much as it always had been – either as a convenient shorthand for a selective and eclectic use of serial devices, or even now to compensate for the commentator’s confusion as to what such devices were present at all.

But ever more apparent were the commonalities with serialism to be found even in music that styled itself as a reaction against it. Minimal music, for instance, may have seemed worlds away from serialism on account of its high degree of redundancy and repetition and its often (pan-)diatonic pitch framework. And yet the idea of the ‘automatic’ process left to ‘run its course’ without further compositional intervention, exaggeratedly invoked with reference to works of generalised serialism, is arguably far truer of the early process pieces of Steve Reich (see Reference GannGann 2006). Similar observations might be made of the canonic, isorhythmic, and rotational procedures in the music of Arvo Pärt, whose ‘break’ with serialism in the mid-1970s can in retrospect be seen as aesthetic or stylistic rather than technical in nature (see Reference ClarkeClarke 1993). And just as the more arcane forms of serial permutation had sought constant self-renewal, so ‘automatism’ of process remains prized for its ability to generate the non-identical in the guise of the identical: the quasi-ostinato textures in a work such as Per Nørgård’s Second Symphony (1970/1) avoid internal repetition through their dependence on the ‘infinity series’ – integer-modelled patterns that, when replicated on different levels, give rise to a nested self-symmetry that has more to do with fractal geometry than any quasi-Schenkerian hierarchy (see Reference ChristensenChristensen 2004: 107–15).

Others have seen the legacy of serial thought more in the technological realm. Georgina Born characterises the ‘discourse of post-serialism’ as pursuing ‘the systematic combination of scientific and technological analysis and generation of sound materials for composition while loosening any necessary commitment to serial organisation’ (Reference BornBorn 1995: 52). Perhaps the most significant such attempt is represented by the spectral music of Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, and Kajia Saariaho, music which, as Liam Cagney has convincingly argued, was nonetheless shaped by a ‘critique and reformulation’ of the serial, and reflected a similar ‘desire … to coin a new, generalisable compositional system’ (Reference Cagney, Heile and WilsonCagney 2019: 401). And here too the path from system to score is not quite as literal as is sometimes assumed: between sound spectra and notated sonority, a significant degree of ‘expedient readjustment’ intervenes. Ultimately, perhaps, the foregrounding of this tension between system and realisation, between ‘eye’ and ‘ear’, may be one of serialism’s most potent legacies. Repeatedly emphasised in Boulez’s last major set of lectures was the free flow ‘between virtual idea and real idea – between projecting a generalised idea containing the means of its realisation and a fully realised, restricted idea that can proliferate, expanding into a generalised concept’ (Reference Boulez, Dunsby, Goldman and WhittallBoulez 2018: 564). While serialism was known for adopting the former approach, namely proceeding from the generalised idea, Brian Ferneyhough has spoken of his preference for the latter, starting with a ‘fully composed-out’ musical event, which is then broken down into its ‘parametric variables’ (Reference BorosBoros 1990: 24).

But just as the boundary between the ‘serial’ and the ‘post-serial’ remains blurred, so, with hindsight, does the gap appear to narrow between serial composition in particular and key aspects of the literate compositional tradition in general. Serialism, as this chapter has suggested, was never as undialectical as what Nono perjoratively dubbed ‘the concretisation of pre-formed structures’ (Reference Nono and StenzlNono 1975: 200). More often it reflected the need to encounter something ‘other’ – whether a system of generation or a specific type of material – in order to make ‘other’, to create something that the self alone could not achieve through solipsistic reliance on its own instincts. Helmut Lachenmann has spoken of serial means as ‘an aid to invention’, to which one relates ‘as a sculptor relates to a chanced-upon unhewed stone’, in a way that ‘helps [the] imagination beyond its own limits’ (Reference Lachenmann and HäuslerLachenmann 1996: 148). There has been a marked tendency, in the wake of an influential essay by Dahlhaus, to see the notion of the ‘demands of the material’ purely as a fiction, a pretended objectivity designed to mask the subjective, autonomous decision-making of the composer (Reference DahlhausDahlhaus 1987). But, like Lachenmann’s unhewed stone, which can resist a purposeful human onslaught, choosing to fracture that way rather than this, so musical materials have their inbuilt resistances and affordances – not least the intrinsic combinatorial constraints of the equal-tempered chromaticism with which so many serial composers have grappled and which set-class theory, itself an offshoot of serial theory, sought to chart (see Reference SchuijerSchuijer 2008). If fewer composers now profess an overt allegiance to serialism, what nonetheless survives for many is that need for an explicit confrontation with questions of material and process, with the challenges they pose to a body of inherited techniques and aesthetics, and their ability to throw up surprising and unforeseeable gestures – albeit ones that may, in time, become absorbed into an inherited apparatus and thus coalesce into style. Perhaps, therefore, the varied metamorphoses of the serial, however characterised, are best viewed as phases in a longer history of composers’ dialogue with sound, its abstract tokens no more – but also no less – than its concrete reality.

Serialism is often attached to a familiar canon of pieces: Pierre Boulez’s Structures I and II (1952, 1961), Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel (1952), Milton Babbitt’s All Set (1957) – these are in heavy rotation in textbooks, anthologies, and our classrooms. If my students and I extracted a definition of the musical practice from these exemplars, we could probably agree upon the following: (1) serialism is primarily manifest in acoustic music; (2) precompositional charts allow composers to organise musical elements as discrete bits, enabling a ‘total’ systematisation involving several parameters (pitch, rhythm, timbre, articulation, etc.); (3) serialism depends upon order and pattern completion, as the music proceeds through iterations of the series. Serialism, as I often teach and conceptualise it, is situated as a mid-century, institutional, White, high-art, modernist phenomenon.

My students and I rehearse familiar critical conversations too, observing that integral serialism hews uncomfortably close, in both sound and method, to the chance operations of John Cage’s Music of Changes (1951). The sonic and conceptual binds of the total control/total chance paradox were, after all, already part of serialism’s internal discourse, articulated in the exchanges between Boulez and Cage, in the self-reflexive critiques of mid-century composers such as György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis, in reviews by hostile contemporaries such as John Backus and George Perle, and recapitulated by later historians such as Richard Taruskin and M. J. Grant (Reference BackusBackus 1962; Reference GrantGrant 2001; Reference LigetiLigeti 1960a; Reference PerlePerle 1960; Reference NattiezNattiez 1993; Reference 402TaruskinTaruskin 2005b: 37–44; Reference XenakisXenakis 1956).

The scope and complexity of this volume already complicates these simplistic but sticky textbook definitions, namely that serialism is primarily about acoustic music, discrete bits, order, and pattern completion. This chapter will further unsettle these core assumptions by focusing on the ways that technologies – both analogue and digital – contribute to the formation of a serial attitude in music. Several questions form a starting point: How does electronic technology impinge upon, or even generate, serial thought? How is serialism in music distinguished from serial thought in computing more broadly, and should it be? What does it mean to translate music into discrete bits? Can hip hop and electronic dance music (EDM) – with their bit-like combinatorics, their shuffling of fixed musical cells – exhibit a serial attitude? Must serial music sound like the academic serialism of the above-mentioned canonical pieces? Does serialism exist outside of mid-century modernist academic music? What are serialism’s boundaries and limits?

My hypothesis is this: serialism is not easily contained as a set of techniques. It is not just a way of composing at a particular time and place, nor is it reducible to a single aesthetic posture. Instead, a ‘serial attitude’ is developed in multiple locales as technologies are integrated into music-making. I push forward from the mid-century moment, arguing that serial music is developed at an interface with machines in various techno-musical scenarios, ranging from the analogue studio to early computer music, to hip hop and EDM. As such, I aim to unseat serialism’s mid-century modernist hegemony, extending the understanding of the scope, definition, and limits of serial attitudes as developed cooperatively with technologies.

One important disclaimer: I organise this essay chronologically (from mid-century electronic studios, to early computer music scenes, to DJ-based technologies), but I do not mean to imply influence or genealogy. There is not a linear relationship between the institutional avant-garde studios of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) or Columbia-Princeton and subsequent generations of electronic artists, whose ideas grow and develop in their own particular technical, historical, and aesthetic circumstances. I am more interested in the ways that serial ideas are shaped in conjunction with machinic affordances in various scenarios (see Gibson 2005). From the outset, I would like to suspend the commonplace idea that Stockhausen, Boulez, Babbitt, and Cage are the originators of interesting musical ideas, and that cultural production necessarily trickles down from institutional, high-art, prestige milieus. I hope this will allow a sharper focus upon the shaping influence of particular technological affordances. I ask with curiosity whether several disparate scenes might serve as boundary cases for a serial attitude, if not a genealogical bond.

In the Analogue Studio

Serialism, in common parlance, has roots in the 1920s dodecaphony of Schoenberg (and perhaps Hauer), while its ‘integral’ phase begins with 1950s avant-garde acoustic music – this prefigured in Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (1949), or if you buy the mythology of the post-war European avant-garde, Webern’s re-orchestration of the Ricercar from Bach’s Art of Fugue (1935) (Reference Boulez and ThéveninBoulez 1991k: 299; Reference Ligeti and LichtenfeldLigeti 2007d; Reference SamuelSamuel 1976: 25). Despite these prevalent mythologies, serial thought did not begin exclusively at any one of these moments. Serialism – of the canonical, mid-century, acoustic sort – is obviously premised on a kind of digital thinking: namely, that music can be reduced to discrete bits, whose orders are managed by a compositional system. It is tempting to connect the rise of musical serialism to the rise of computing and digital thought in the twentieth century. And yet, as Roger Moseley argues, the historical scope is much larger. Much of music, from Ancient Greece to Renaissance counterpoint, to Baroque partimenti, to nineteenth-century mechanical inventions, is in some way digital (Reference MoseleyMoseley 2016: 49–117). Via keyboards especially, music is digital when it is composed for the discrete digits of the fingers. Notations are discrete renderings of continuous sound waves. Pitches are either on or off. Simultaneously, though, music is and has always been analogue – music is also about breath, wind, continuity, and sound waves (Reference KrukowskiKrukowski 2017). It is not quite accurate to think about how music is digital without thinking about how it is also analogue. I will spend quite a bit of time musing over the analogue–digital dialectic in this chapter, so it will be useful to keep this framework in mind.

Mid-century acoustic serialists, working with an essentially digital system of discrete bits, matrices, and orders, already found it challenging to manage the encroaching analogue parameters of timbre, dynamics, and articulations. These so-called ‘secondary’ parameters, which are more obviously continuously rather than discretely scaled, were much more difficult to plot on a matrix than pitch and duration (Reference MeyerMeyer 1967: 247–8). The analogue problem was articulated even more strongly when the same composers encountered electronic technologies that prioritised sweeps, ranges, and continua. Composers came into the Cologne WDR studio with big dreams and calculated serial sketches that specified values in several parameters (frequency, duration, timbre, etc.). Cooperating with their technicians, they spent time tuning generators and filters to specific frequencies, building new timbres partial-by-partial, and cutting tape to predetermined lengths Iverson 2017a, 2017b. Consider Stockhausen’s Studie II (1954), with its additive synthesis timbres layered up from square root–derived inharmonic partials, and Gottfried Michael Koenig’s Essay (1957), with its iterative, proportional durations manifest in precise tape lengths (Reference IversonIverson 2019: 105–93).

Despite these discrete, calculated, best-laid plans, the mid-century serial composers encountered frustration and failure in the studio. They had to temper their disciplined digital exactitude almost immediately. First, composers and technicians found that realising such exact, precise serial plans took an enormous – an impractically enormous – amount of time. Moreover, on my reading, electronic composers were still smarting from the circulating critique of acoustic serial music – namely, that it overwhelmed the listener with too many discrete bits, too much information, and therefore numbed attention (cf. Reference BabbittBabbitt 1958). Composers wanted to use studio technologies to construct entirely new timbres and deftly nested forms, but their early experiments amounted to electronic versions of acoustic pointillism – a dissatisfying, disorienting wash of even more alienating bleeps and bloops.

In response to these aesthetic and technical hurdles, composers and technicians began to experiment with shortcuts and improvisations that were both more efficient and more effective. ‘Statistical form’, developed by Stockhausen and Koenig, used the discrete bits of a series to set boundaries but filled in those boundaries gesturally with approximations (Reference IversonIverson 2014b). This methodology – serialised limits filled with improvised contents – was much more amenable to the analogue studio with its myriad knobs and dials. Imagine Stockhausen and his technician Koenig improvising the hand-sketched curves of Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) by turning the knobs of a pulse generator, thereby filling a predetermined, serial duration with gradually accelerating pulses (Stockhausen 2001; Reference WilliamsWilliams 2015, Reference Williams2016). Imagine them turning the volume knobs to create swells and recording these volume curves upon the piece’s serially determined pitch mixtures, durations, and articulation envelopes in much the same way matrices for various parameters were overlaid in acoustic serial works.

Does starting to turn knobs mean departing from serialism? Continua introduce inherently analogue traits into what had previously been a mostly digital mindset, but I am unconvinced that this is incommensurate with a serial attitude. The studio composer encountered a starker, more pressing version of the acoustic composer’s secondary-parameter conundrum. Given analogue studio technologies, their dreamed-for digital, parametric, compositional processes had to be adjusted away from purity. It is helpful to remember that composers of this era moved freely between the studio and the concert hall, composing both electronic and acoustic music from the same technical, conceptual, and aesthetic commitments. In some cases, composers realised acoustic versions of pieces that failed in the studio; in other cases, composers set into the studio with plans that would be too difficult for human performers to realise. The flow between acoustic and electronic versions of serialism is robust. The mid-century composer had to find a way to be both serial and continuous, both digital and analogue.

The ‘statistical’ or analogue adaptations made in the late 1950s, WDR studio definitely improved the efficiency with which composers realised their plans, but also allowed for headway on trenchant perceptual problems – particularly those that overwhelmed listeners. Composers incorporated much knowledge from Werner Meyer-Eppler (a former Nazi scientist, WDR studio founder, and University of Bonn professor), who taught the composers how to integrate acoustics and human perception into their serial electronic works (Reference UngeheuerUngeheuer 1992; Reference IversonIverson 2020). Meyer-Eppler’s perceptual orientation is reflected, for example, in Stockhausen’s famous ‘… how time passes …’ essay, in which he showed that pitch and rhythm flow along the same continuum (Reference StockhausenStockhausen 1959). Koenig’s concept of Bewegungsfarbe [moving sound-colour] – piloted in Koenig’s electronic piece Essay (1957) and further exploited by György Ligeti in the acoustic harpsichord piece Continuum (1968) – is a sonic manifestation of this insight. The basic idea is that small discrete bits, that is, pitches or pulses heard at very short durations, can transform into a timbral continuum depending on whether the succession is played fast enough to induce a blurring effect in the brain of the listener. In these pieces, serialism became about perception as much as order. Mid-century serialism became a discourse about how to make continua from discrete bits, and vice versa (Reference UngeheuerUngeheuer 1994, Reference Ungeheuer1997). In other words, mid-century serialism trafficked along the continuum between analogue and digital ways of making, thinking, and hearing.

The WDR composers arrived here because of analogue knobs and also because of their exposure, via Meyer-Eppler, to the key concepts of information theory (Reference IversonIverson 2019: 105–38). Claude Shannon’s 1949 equation called attention not only to the discrete, measurable amount of information in a message (the bits), but also to its repetitions, redundancies, and interruptions as expressed in a variable or noisy channel. A key part of the information-theory equation – the sampling theorem – speculated about how a continuous entity like a sound wave could be segmented into bits and sampled fast enough that there would be no loss of intelligible, communicated information, despite a measurable reduction in quality and size of the message. Information theory was useful during the war for several applications, including calculating bomb trajectories and designing code-breaking systems. Meyer-Eppler had used such information-theoretic concepts in designing signal-extraction systems for the Nazi military’s Kriegsmarine and building electronic larynges similar to Bell Labs’ Voder.

Though information theory concepts were amenable to adaptation in a wide variety of fields, language was a particularly salient realm for experimenting (Reference IversonIverson 2019: 167–93). In Meyer-Eppler’s seminars, Stockhausen remembered cutting up newspaper articles into words, syllables, and eventually phonemes, and then rearranging the bits to study the redundancies (Reference KurtzKurtz 1992: 70). It is the same procedure that Ligeti analogously used in Artikulation (1957) to randomly join several different types of electronically generated sounds. Mauricio Kagel waded deeply into phonetic experiments in the serial acoustic piece Anagrama (1958), where he used phonemes (such as the vowels e, o, u and the consonants n, g, and s) as the discrete bits (Reference Kassel and TaddayKassel 2004). These linguistic sounds became models for musical timbres in Kagel’s parallel electronic piece Transicíon I (1958). In both, the phonemes are organised into continua (such as u–ü–i–ü–u and ooo–nnn–sss) that produce timbral morphing, via human singers or sine-tone oscillators and white-noise generators.

The particular affordances of analogue machines and information theory discourses demonstrate how and why the mid-century serial attitude evolved. The knobs and dials of the machinery invited composers to explore not only how to produce discrete data points, but also how to create connections between them. Composers simultaneously learned new discourses – particularly information theory and experimental phonetics – that shaped their understanding of human perception as a continuous and fluctuating capacity. This, in turn, greatly shaped their thinking on musical issues such as timbre, duration, succession, and repetition. The mid-century iteration of serialism was navigated in cooperation with the physical technologies of the analogue studio as well as with the conceptual technologies of information theory and phonetics. The evolution in mid-century serial thought – an evolution from ordered bits to perceptual continua – was largely accomplished as digitally thinking composers navigated the new technologies and new ideas of the analogue electronic studio.

In Early Computer Music

As the transition from analogue to digital technologies began in the late 1950s – as nascent computing grew in several different Cold War locales – composers continued to evaluate the relationships between discrete bits, continuities, and serially controlled orders. Early digital technologies, such as punch cards and binary code, were particularly amenable to the parametric thinking familiar from the first 1950s post-war phase of serialism, with its programmed acoustic matrices. And yet the WDR analogue studio-inspired continuities, continua, and timbre-building projects did not disappear from serial thought, not least because some early computing technologies remained analogue in concept and execution. I will consider early computer music scenes in the Netherlands, at Bell Labs in New Jersey, and at the Columbia-Princeton electronic studio, in each case exploring the overlapping analogue and digital practices that shaped the second 1960s stage of serial practice.

Columbia-Princeton

Nearby in Princeton, New Jersey, engineers at the research-and-development laboratory of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) were working with similar ideas as they developed experimental synthesizers called the RCA Mark I (c. 1955) and Mark II (c. 1960). RCA’s aim was to develop a computer-controlled synthesizer for the production of hit records – imagined as a way to add profit and efficiency to their imbricated projects of recording, radio broadcasting, and television – but the technology they developed turned out to be more useful for producing niche, high-art serial music than for producing hit records. The Mark II, a prototype first leased and eventually gifted to the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio, used a digital interface to cue relay switches operating a plethora of analogue equipment inside the machine: oscillators, generators, filters, portamento gliders, octave shifters, and more. In other words, the Mark II was both digital and analogue. It used a primitive computer interface of binary code (0s and 1s), repeated in five channels in a punch-card programming mechanism, to drive a studio’s worth of analogue sound equipment (Reference HolmesHolmes 2016: 190–206; Reference ManningManning 2013: 83–98; Reference PattersonPatterson 2011).

The parametric thinking that characterised both Koenig’s Projects and Bell Labs’ MUSICn software was even more obvious in the Mark II. Engineers Henry Olson and Herbert Belar began by analysing the physical components of sound – frequency, loudness, wave forms, envelope, and time – and then related these to the musical functions of pitch, volume, timbre, envelope, and rhythm via the punch-card interface (Reference Olson and BelarOlson and Belar 1955; Reference Olson, Belar and TimmensOlson, Belar, and Timmens 1960). The machine they produced was thus highly amenable to the parametric musical categorisation that Milton Babbitt pursued in his serial works, as the music-to-punch-card translation in Figure 20.1 shows. Such parametric thinking was not just a product of the digital age; it was already present in the purely acoustic late-1940s and 1950s serialism, as it was in both chance-based and indeterminate works of John Cage, such as Music of Changes and Variations I. And yet RCA’s Mark II was an ideal system for realising such parametric music, enabling, in the words of Peter Manning, ‘a seemingly effortless transition from a strictly ordered style of instrumental writing to an electronic equivalent’ (Reference ManningManning 2013: 97). The Mark II only heightened the degree to which Babbitt could realise his meticulously organised serial scores, with the precision of the punch cards circumventing the fallibility of ‘recalcitrant performers’ (Reference BabbittBabbitt 1964: 262; cf. Reference 387MaconieMaconie 2011 and Reference MorrisMorris 1997).

Figure 20.1 Milton Babbitt sketch, perhaps for Composition for Synthesizer (Reference Babbitt1961) or Ensembles for Synthesizer (1964), showing how music notation was translated into the five-channel parameters of the RCA Mark II.

Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center Records, 1958–2014. Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries. Temporary inventory box CPEMC-00264

Curiously – or perhaps not, given widespread technological fascination at mid-century – several other composers put the Mark II to quite different ends than Babbitt’s rigid integral serialism. Consider the underground cult classic Leiyla and the Poet (1961) made at the Columbia-Princeton Studio by the Egyptian-American composer Halim El-Dabh (Reference GluckGluck 2007). The five-minute-long musique concrète piece mixed Mark II-generated sounds, spoken word recitations, and the recorded sounds of Egyptian folk instruments such as the darabukka hand drums and the stringed oud. El-Dabh programmed the Mark II to produce synthesized whistles, percussive burbles, and noisy sweeps, which punctuate his evocative aural collage. El-Dabh’s musical experimentation began in Egypt in the mid-1940s, when he produced musique concrète (before it was a recognised category and likely before, or concurrent with, Pierre Schaeffer’s experiments). El-Dabh captured the voices of women singing in a zaar ceremony with a wire recorder and manipulated them with radio equipment; no surprise, then, that his use of the Mark II differed substantially from Babbitt’s iterative, parametricised, musico-mathematical programs.

Similarly, Wendy Carlos – in pre-Switched on Bach (1968) days a music-composition student at Columbia University – experimented with the Mark II in pieces like Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers (1963), Variations for Flute and Electronic Sound (1964), and Episodes for Piano and Electronic Sound (1964) (Reference SewellSewell 2020), though she rejected the serial rigidity of Babbitt and his followers:

They seemed to offer ONLY dodecaphonic, or serial, atonal fare, and other quite severe, generally ugly styles. That was not for me, and contrariwise, those of us who tried to find other less restrictive musical styles and genres were not what the new group wanted to play, either. A standoff. So several other composer friends and I decided to restart the earlier Columbia Composers [concert series] program. For the three years I attended, we presented new music in a broad selection of styles and media, and carried on the earlier tradition the best we could. We rented McMillin Theater (now Miller), designed and printed our own programs (we’d cart our master sheets down to ERS offset printers downtown), much as amateur performers have always managed. I still have nostalgic thoughts about some of those concert experiences … !

(Reference CarlosCarlos n.d.)

Despite Carlos’s distaste for Babbitt’s rigid parametric serialism, an electronic fragment like her Geodesic Dance (c. 1975), in which geodesic dome proportions provide the temporal shapes and rhythms, has some resonances with serialism’s emphasis on proportions and intervallic relations. Carlos’s serial attitude in a piece like Geodesic Dance emphasises the separability of parameters, at least insofar as they can be extracted and recombined in new ways, to new effects, as in quadraphonic sound.

Likewise for the rhythmic experiments advanced by John Pierce on the Music from Mathematics album. In pieces like Five Against Seven–Random Canon and Melodie, Pierce programmed the computer to produce conflicting rhythmic patterns that were difficult or impossible for those recalcitrant – or simply human – performers. Consider also Tenney’s Music for Player Piano (1964), which passed off similar impossible-to-humans rhythmic tasks on the machine-operated piano. Bell Labs’ IBM computers could shine here: the separate, parallel channels of a primitive digital machine easily handled such differentiated rhythmic streams. In these instances, we see serial-adjacent composers like El-Dabh, Carlos, Pierce, and Tenney using early digital technology for somewhat different ends from the rigid parametric serialism promulgated by Babbitt. By standing on the analogue–digital divide and interacting with the parametric thinking encoded in early digital machines – as extracted from traditional, machinic, analogue devices – composers found new ways to elaborate issues of syntax, order, and coordination in their music. They experimented with a serial attitude even when they weren’t entirely ensconced in a strict serial practice.

In Sampling Cultures

If electronic and computer music scenes have a strong aesthetic and technical correlation with serialism – indeed are central to mid-century, academic, integral serialism – then drawing such connections with the vernacular music in the rest of this chapter is less familiar. I would like to explore the ways that sample-based music – both EDM and hip hop – may exhibit a serial attitude, not least because of the prolific use of drum machines, samplers, and sequencers. The pivot is tenuous for several reasons: first, outside of the usual historical and aesthetic locales of serial practice (in White mid-century academic institutions), one wonders whether it even makes sense to trace a serial attitude, to use those concepts and definitions. In short, serialism is habitually studied as a historically, socio-culturally, and aesthetically constrained idea, even if we fail to admit as much. Secondly, though moving forward in historical time, I do not seek a chain of influence that connects mid-century iterations of serialism (either analogue or digital) to sample-based musics of the late 1970s to 2010s. Instead, I seek to notice and explore certain conceptual and technical similarities between de rigueur serialism and various sample-based musics, similarities underwritten by encounters with technology.

The juxtaposition is tricky, though, as Amir Said points out. Any argument that draws together hip hop with Western music theorising (or vernacular music with high-art music, or Black music with White/European music) frequently stages the comparison in the terms of the dominant culture, privileging the modes, values, and attitudes of White, European high-art music (Reference SaidSaid 2013: 306–7). I’m definitely not interested in reifying a damaged (and damaging) value hierarchy, in which White, academic, mid-century serialism is judged the only true serialism. Nor would I be interested in an argument that ‘elevated’ hip hop and EDM as worthy objects of study by proving that they exhibit serial features. Hip hop, EDM, and music of all kinds are worthy of study on their own terms.

The posture I’m after here is one of observation, even curiosity, in noticing similar features in disparate musics, not least because technological affordance is a crucial factor in each scenario. Once vernacular composers sit down at a DAW, a sequencer, or a drum machine, their thinking and acting has resonance with the mid-century modernists who were programming music in the analogue or computer music studio. My analysis in this section aims to clarify resonances as well as differences within these serial attitudes. I’m going to spend some time listening closely to and describing the music as heard – more so than in the previous sections. I hope this will provide an opportunity to contemplate the quasi-serial features that are embedded in the music, as well as the technologies with which it was constructed. It is hard to know what to do with a juxtaposition that is neither a genealogy nor a value metric, but I ask the reader to entertain the ideas outside of these more familiar modes of comparison. This is an experiment.

A first observation, then, might notice the ways that sample-based musics return to the same fundamental obsession of serial composers: managing discrete bits and programming orders, especially with the help of technologies. This is immediately obvious in the late 1970s and early 1980s proto-electronic dance music of the Yellow Magic Orchestra (hereafter YMO), a Japanese group who were fond of humorously parodying Westerners’ Orientalist fantasies (Reference HayashiHayashi 2017). The band’s three members (Haruomi Hosono, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Yukihiro Takahashi) brought together their various previous experiences – as rock, glam, and jazz session musicians, as experimenters with drum machines and synths, and as composers of academic electronic music – to produce techno-pop that referenced an assortment of genres and styles. I’ll begin by listening closely and analysing what this proto-EDM techno-pop contains, before exploring how, and with what technology, it was made.

‘Technopolis’, the first track from the album Solid State Survivor (1979), is paradigmatic. Like many of the band’s songs, it is highly modular at all levels, from the layered grooves to the repeated bit-like melodies, to the sectional form. The piece begins with a futuristic, distorted, Vocoder-like voice speaking ‘Tokyo’ (perhaps the technopolis in question), a timbre that marks the groove section on all its returns (see Figure 20.2). The groove section itself (X) is composed of several layers – a funk bass line of quavers, a major-second synth melody soon doubled in a fauxbourdon series of parallel fourths, glistening high-frequency octaves, and disco-like organ chords. Above this groove, the modular blocks of A, B, and C melodies rotate in and out. The A module is a G minor ascending Japanese-style melody, whose plucked-string synth timbre and sol-le-sol ornament together seem to solidify the Asian reference. (YMO’s self-conscious orientalising – from their cheeky band name to the raced sounds they invoke – is a signature of their style, one that is somewhat uncomfortable then and now.) The B module switches to a flute-like synth timbre and a descending contour, circling down from me to sol before turning back upwards again to close the back half of the circle. The C module is a canon of two synth trumpets chasing each other through an ascending G major pentascale (do re mi fa sol) at the distance of two beats.

Figure 20.2 Yellow Magic Orchestra, ‘Technopolis’, sectional formal plan.

Dotted line marks temporal halfway point. X = groove, A = Japanese melody, B = flute melody, C = trumpet canon

The meter throughout, perhaps unsurprisingly, is a boxy $\begin{array}{c}4\\ 4\end{array}$ ; the A, B, and C modules are each four bars long in simplest iteration, but typically occupy eight bars of space in each appearance of the form diagram of Figure 20.2; when modules are further extended or truncated, it is by +/− four measures. In the first half of the track sections follow one another in simple alternation; in the second half, melodic modules are superimposed and combined – B″ is the flute melody overlaid with the trumpet canon of the C module. This layered B″ section, alternating with the groove-oriented Vocoder beats of the X groove, take ‘Technopolis’ to its conclusion.

The music’s contained regularity accrues across several domains: motives are timbrally distinct, melodically circular, and self-repeating; they fit neatly within an extremely regular metric grid; phrasal repetitions occur in multiples of four. Sections shift with regularity, cycling through self-contained blocks of musical material that are clearly distinct and hardly porous to each other. It is easy to see, in retrospect, how YMO (aka ‘the Japanese Kraftwerk’) prefigures the electronic dance music that would explode over the next two decades. But what does YMO’s modular techno-pop have to do with a serial attitude?

One correspondence is that YMO’s discrete bits and programmed orders flow from machinic affordances. YMO used a Roland MC-8 MicroComposer on their first two albums, an early (but not the first) music sequencer launched by the Japanese company in 1977. A sequencer is a small computer that stores musical sounds or phrases, allowing them to be triggered at the desired time in live performance, recording, or another playback scenario. Sequencers, in their pure form, don’t produce sounds themselves but rather store phrases; in a few more years, of course, Roland, Yamaha, and other companies would produce mass-market keyboard synthesizers that included on-board sequencers (think of the Yamaha CS30 or the Casio VL-1, for instance). At this nascent moment, however, synthesizer and sequencer technology were often separate. The eight channels of the MC-8 had far more memory than competitors’ models, enough to retain up to 5,300 notes, or all the separate lines of YMO’s techno-pop songs. Phrases could either be played in from an external synthesizer connected via a cable or could be programmed in via a calculator-like keypad on the machine (cf. Reference CarterCarter 1997).

Programming music into the MC-8 meant iteratively translating notation into numbers, a method similar to that required to program the RCA Mark II (see Figure 20.3, cf. Figure 20.1). The manual described the process parameter by parameter: instructions for how to encode pitch, then durations, then dynamics, then timbre/instrumental sounds (from whatever external synthesizer source is connected), then chords. The MC-8’s technological capability differed only nominally from the digital-analogue computing of the Mark II (punch cards versus a calculator-like keypad). YMO dealt with a programmable sequencer technology, and a resultantly parametric composing process, that strongly paralleled mid-century serial technologies and attitudes.

Figure 20.3 Programming the MC-8 using numeric translations of pitch and duration at specific timepoints (for example, measures and beats or ‘steps’).

Owner’s manual, p. 24

But, simultaneously, it would be foolish not to acknowledge YMO’s radically different aesthetic results. YMO may have begun with discrete bits, parametric thinking, and iterative processes, but they arrive in the genre of techno-pop rather than multiple serialism. What gives? The answer might be as simple as loops. It’s time to state the obvious: repetition of many kinds – groove, meter, verse-chorus forms, melody, harmonic progression, and so on – is crucial to minimalism, hip hop, EDM, and vernacular genres more broadly (Reference MiddletonMiddleton 1983; Reference Julien and LevauxJulien and Levaux 2018; Reference FinkFink 2005a; Reference ButlerButler 2014). Such repetitions are apparently antithetical to serialism of the mid-century stripe, which studiously and relentlessly enacted the high-modernist twelve-tone orthodoxy of ever-new (Reference MeyerMeyer 1967: 240–4). There are a few exceptions – Goeyvaerts’s tape pieces such as Nr. 4 and Nr. 5, or Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel – that prominently use loop-like processes of mirroring and formal symmetry. And yet these exceptions are usually occluded or rationalised away in the commonplace, crystallised definition of orthodox serialism as described in the first paragraph of this chapter. We have collectively had our stock in a narrower definition of serialism, one that prioritises an aesthetic choice of high-modernist defamiliarisation, especially as created via constant non-repetition.

Exploring serialism’s technical conceits as distinct from its aesthetic conceits, as in this chapter, provides an opportunity to re-evaluate that oft-repeated (but never-quite-realised) axiom: that serialism does not preclude stylistic variety (Reference MeyerMeyer 1967: 279). The shift from modernist asceticism of the 1950s to the indulgent, repetitive grooves of the late 1970s and early 1980s was perhaps less of an inverse operation than another instantiation of the digital–analogue dialectic. Whereas mid-century serialism emphasised the digital and the discrete (with an attendant estrangement from habit, familiarity, and repetition), EDM emphasised the analogue with its obsessive repetitions and loops (even as it was made with digital technologies). Almost magically, the repetition inherent in the loop invites analogue impressions of continuity, flow, and circularity, as it simultaneously displaces our attention from the digital techniques that underlie YMO’s modular, sequencer-based techno-pop.

These two poles of EDM and serialism are dialectically mediated – historically, technically, and aesthetically – by the minimalism of the 1960s and early 1970s. Minimalism is often characterised as an (over-)correction from the hard-bitten modernist serialism of the 1950s. Likewise, Philip Glass and Steve Reich engaged many of the repetitive melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic loops that would re-emerge as essential stylistic traits of EDM, hip hop, and other vernacular genres. The tape loops engineered and exploited by Terry Riley, Reich, and many others (for instance El-Dabh, Les Paul, Pauline Oliveros, King Tubby, Brian Eno, etc.) create musics fundamentally wedded to repetition. These vernacular and high-art versions of minimalism, all based on loops, are sonic parallelisms of the minimalist pop art of Andy Warhol and others.

We needn’t reinforce the misperception that academic genres (serialism, minimalism) and vernacular genres (disco, EDM, hip hop) stand on opposite sides of an impenetrable high–low divide either. Robert Fink deftly shows the crosstalk between disco and minimalism, while Mark Butler develops the exchanges between EDM and academic electronic music (Reference FinkFink 2005a: 29–31; Reference ButlerButler 2014: 21–3 and 89–93). It may be that we eventually hear such crosstalk between the serial attitudes of mid-century modernists and EDM and hip hop DJs as well. The crosstalk would draw upon the observation that there are lots of ways to get to loops. Given the technological mediation present in each of these scenarios, it’s easier to see how several generations of composers could begin with discrete bits, looping technology, and the question, ‘what in music is programmable?’ and arrive in completely different aesthetic spaces.

Aural repetition may be deliberately attenuated in most mid-century serialism, but loops are dialectically present in serial practices in several ways: via the medieval concepts of color and talea that drove Goeyvaerts’s minimalist-serialist formal symmetries; via the tape loops of the analogue studio; via repeated bits of programmed code (imagine ‘go to’ commands) in the early computer music studio. Minimalists got to loops via tape machines and mantra practices. YMO got to loops via the program-and-play technology of the MC-8 sequencer. Hip hop producers came to loops via a huge range of technologies and techniques, such as live beat-mixing by turntablist DJs in discos and dance clubs, and by sampler and sequencer-using beat-makers (Reference Brewster and BroughtonBrewster and Broughton 2006; Reference ButlerButler 2006, Reference Butler2014). If a ‘serial attitude’ is possible at various times and places – a commitment to digitised, programmed, parametric musicking – then its apparent opposite of ‘looping’ is, seemingly, simultaneously influential in multiple scenarios. In short, the digital and the analogue continually co-exist.

As a final bit of musical thinking, I’d like to dip into early hip hop and examine the way beat construction, especially using the Roland TR-808 drum machine, can exhibit a serial attitude. The Bronx in the late 1970s and early 1980s represents a socio-economic-racial milieu that is the antithesis of the Cologne WDR studio, Bell Labs, or the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center: the Bronx is the home of poor Black youth coping with generations of racism, economic exclusion, housing insecurity, insufficient education, and police violence (Reference ChangChang 2005; Reference KatzKatz 2012; Reference PerryPerry 2004; Reference RoseRose 2004). Early hip hop – a multifaceted art form that includes graffiti artists, DJs, producers/beat-makers, dancers, and MCs/rappers – was born of a desire for a Black-positive, Black-produced, -distributed, and -consumed cultural formation that could provide at least a temporary escape from the grim slog of daily oppression. In a few crucial disco clubs in the mid-to-late 1970s, influential DJs began to foster spaces for Black identity, and often Black queer identity, to form and be validated by community, music, and dance. Amongst others, DJs such as David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Larry Levan, and Frankie Kunckles were creators of Black, queer sub-cultural spaces (cf. Reference LawrenceLawrence 2003; Reference SalkindSalkind 2019; Reference ShapiroShapiro 2005).

There’s much more to be said about the exchanges between disco, funk, nascent NYC house music, nascent Chicago house music, Bronx-based hip hop, and in a few more years, Detroit techno (Reference Brewster and BroughtonBrewster and Broughton 2006: 268–87). I will stick with early hip hop, though, noting that in the early 1980s producers like Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, and Marley Marl began sampling and looping ‘breaks’, the most danceable parts of disco records (Reference SaidSaid 2013: 70–2; Reference SchlossSchloss 2014: 36). Again, many technological paths lead here: turntablism allows for such looping, as does working with a sampler, as does working with tape. Soon hip hop producers (who were usually also turntablists) began creating beats that kept with the practice of sampling previous music but didn’t necessarily adopt long loops (sampled measures, phrases) wholesale. The hip hop techniques of chopping/sampling and synthesizing beats, which became prominent in the early 1980s, resonate with a serial attitude. I’ll have more to say about this in a moment, but first, I’d like to listen to a classic vintage hip hop track, Afrika Bambaataa and the Sonic Soul Force’s ‘Planet Rock’ (1982, original 12” version), to get a sense of how sampled and synth sounds were assembled into a groove.

As the track opens, the MC fires up the crowd: ‘Party people …’. When the beat drops at 0:15, we hear a heavily synthesized groove cobbled together from several sounds available on the TR-808: a bass drum whomp, cowbells, and syncopated synth pings. This groove forms a foundation for the track while the MCs rap, their voices entering and leaving at various intervals. At 0:45, we hear a long melodic sample floating seemingly effortlessly over the synth-bass groove. It’s a quotation from Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans Europe Express’, sped up but transposed down, this by virtue of being replayed, probably on the Fairlight CMI in the Tommy Boy Records studio, rather than sampled from the record (Reference FinkFink 2005b). The melody disappears as the MCs undertake a new verse but returns at 1:43. In combination with the heavily synthesized 808 drum sounds, the Kraftwerk sample seems to solidify the song’s forward-looking techno-futurism, as Bambaataa’s aesthetic vocabulary intertwines with a well-established Afro-Futurist tradition (Reference EshunEshun 1998). The song’s form, similar to YMO’s modularity, alternates between MC verses, audience participation chants (‘Rock it, don’t stop it’), the Kraftwerk sample, and other samples from Babe Ruth’s ‘The Mexican’. Also like YMO, the song builds steam by layering these elements together as the song progresses.

The $\begin{array}{c}4\\ 4\end{array}$ groove, which persists throughout, takes full advantage of the Roland TR-808 drum machine, which had the capability to retain thirty-two programmable patterns over a maximum of 768 bars (Reference OwenOwen 2014; Reference ReidReid 2004). Its sixteen preset percussion sounds (bass drum, snare, conga, cowbells, rimshot, etc.) were produced via analogue synthesizers inside the machine, not from real-life drum samples. Note that the Roland 808 (1980–3) is still in the territory of the Mark II (1960) here, with analogue electronic production technology inside a digital interface. Its electronic presets were criticised for sounding hopelessly unrealistic and canned compared to ‘real’ drum sounds, and yet it was affordable, portable, and boasted a solidly timed on-board sequencer that made it extremely useful for programming beats. So long as one wasn’t hoping to reproduce orchestral percussion or drum sets with fidelity – and why would a hip hop producer, who expressly subverted many aspects of dominant culture, want to? – the presets of the 808 were distinctive, techno-futurist, and embraceable. Bambaataa’s mixing of an 808-produced groove, with Kraftwerk, with his crew’s distinctive MC-ing is a case in point.

The modular, groove-based, technologically informed genres of EDM, techno-pop, and hip hop – though different practices in important ways – continued to cross-pollinate. Detroit techno of the 1980s drew on both hip hop and European/Japanese techno-pop such as Kraftwerk and YMO (Reference Brewster and BroughtonBrewster and Broughton 2006: 340–71); artist-composers like DJ Spooky (Paul Miller) and Beth Coleman drew heavily upon both genres as they produced experimental ‘illbient’ music (a mix of hip hop, ambient, and dub) in fringe NYC clubs in the 1990s (Reference RodgersRodgers 2010: 81–93); the late producer and master beat-maker J Dilla’s posthumously released ‘Go Get ’Em’ (2015) sampled ‘Rap Phenomena’ from YMO’s third album BGM (1981), on which YMO first used the 808; the list goes on. ‘Great,’ you might be thinking. ‘EDM and hip hop shared many similar technologies, composing methods, and sounds.’ But what does any of this have to do with the serial attitude?

The strongest connections can be made over the attempt to identify music’s smallest relevant discrete bits, as well as the technologically mediated methods of extracting, modifying, and ordering them. For hip hop beat-makers, there are essentially two methods for producing a groove: chopping/sampling and synthesizing. The method of chopping/sampling involves assembling a beat from small samples of previously recorded music, either by chopping and internally reconfiguring the sounds from one longer phrase, or assembling a beat from several different sampled sources (Reference SchlossSchloss 2014: 106–8; Reference SaidSaid 2013: 182–3). The second method, synthesizing, involves using a drum machine such the TR-808 to produce synthesized drum sounds, which are then assembled and looped to form the song’s foundation. In reality, the practices of chopping/sampling and synthesizing are often not mutually exclusive – a ‘canned’ synth sound from a drum machine might be modified by further processing, or a sampled sound might be mixed with a drum machine sound, distorting the timbre of the sample to sound more or less like an object of the producer’s imagination (cf. Reference SaidSaid 2013: 176–92 and 454–5). The hip hop beat-maker’s intensive focus on the timbre of each drum sound – the time and effort spent refining, manipulating, and customising discrete bits – resonates strongly with the timbre obsessions demonstrated by many serial-minded electronic and computer composers (Reference SaidSaid 2013: 133–40).

There’s a connection related to order as well. For beatmakers, the function of the (sampled or synthesized) sound is determined both by its timbre and by its temporal placement in the beat. Hip hop expectations are for $\begin{array}{c}4\\ 4\end{array}$  meter, with a bass drum on beats 1 and 3, snare on beats 2 and 4, and hi-hat on the ‘8ths’ when desired (Reference SaidSaid 2013: 148–60). Beyond these most basic guidelines, however, Said offers myriad suggestions for customisation, from timbre modification (‘snares are not always actual snare-drum sounds’) to micro-timing modifications such as ‘flush’, ‘pinched-in’, ‘wrapped’, and ‘stranded’ (Reference SaidSaid 2013: 132 and 149ff.). In short, beat-makers employ an enormous and varied customisation of both timbre and timing, and yet produce highly entrainable grooves. This is because order, drawn from a shared template of basic normative expectations, determines the sounds’ function. The atomised particles of a beat, as in other forms of serialism, need to be placed in relationship to one another to mean as music. The beat-maker’s programming, if you will, serially organises the bits within the beat structure.

This programmed attitude towards order continues as producers navigate how to join loops together, transition between sections, and assemble modular elements into a formed piece (Reference SaidSaid 2013: 166–92). Hip hop producers’ focus, all the way up the composition’s structure, on the placement of elements within the beat, measure, loop, and form shows a programmed attitude that resonates with serialism – albeit with the aim of producing clever new contexts for familiar samples, danceable breakbeats, and groove-foundations for rhymes.

Despite enormous aesthetic differences, it’s striking to realise how closely such hip hop practices parallel the central conceits of modernist serialism and information theory: all three grapple with organising the bit-like abstractions that constitute a phrase’s smallest units. The analogue–digital question also resurfaces, as a stream of recorded sound is chopped up and preserved as bits in sampling practices. This is definitely the case if a digital sampler or DAW is used to organise the samples; master turntablists also chop beats using several turntables in cooperation, which preserves more of the technology and the aura of the analogue. As with the murkiness of sampled versus synthesized sound sources, though, asking whether beat-making practices are fully and completely digital or analogue is beside the point. It’s more productive to notice the transference between digital and analogue, between parts and whole, between bits and continuities, as hip hop producers employ a serial attitude to create beats using several different technologies.

Conclusion

Having ventured quite far afield, it may be helpful to return to the definition at the beginning of this chapter, the one my students might have inferred from my teaching: that serialism is primarily about mid-century modernist acoustic music, discrete bits, order, and pattern completion. This essay has shown that every tenet of that definition is unstable, in need of redefinition and context. Acoustic composers may have begun with the question of how to organise music by discrete bits, but they immediately had to deal with secondary parameters that were not amenable to such discrete partitioning. Almost immediately, serial parameterisation was thoroughly infused by the analogue technologies of the studio, as bits were shaped into continua with volume knobs and filter-created phonetic vowel streams.

Such analogue thinking did not disappear from the serial attitude in the nascent digital age. Early computers such as the Mark II wrapped a digital interface around analogue technologies, which, as Tenney discovered in using the noise generator at Bell Labs, gave more satisfying sonic results anyway. Parametric thinking like Koenig’s, Mathews’s, and Babbitt’s resonated strongly with digital technologies, but missing converters and unsatisfying synthesized sounds limited the degree to which serial music could be fully digital and still be aesthetically satisfying. The project of (serially) synthesizing timbre – a dream launched in the analogue studio and continued in MUSICn and other areas of digital computer music – needed many years and many collaborations to come to fruition.

In the meantime, new digital technologies like sequencers and drum machines offered new ways to manipulate bits, patterns, and orders. Their use in vernacular genres lends a serial attitude to musics such as hip hop and EDM that are, in many important ways, distant from modernist serialism. This permissive exploration has argued that serialism is not only an aesthetic commitment held by mid-century modernist composers. The serial attitude is a way of working with musical material – especially in cooperation with technologies – that moves across and between genres. Serialism is not only the defamiliarised, non-repetition of matrices and musics produced in high-art academic electronic studios. The serial attitude can also be found in the modularity of techno-pop or the programmed, sampled beats of hip hop.

And yet, the question of what serialism is – definitively – presses. This essay has argued that serial attitudes were shaped by technological intervention. As such, it might make sense to focus greater analytical attention on the ways that instruments, interfaces, and technologies shape musical behaviour(s). The juxtapositions from various historical and aesthetic milieux further press the definitional issue: is serialism a label for a genre (with its attendant socio-economic-racial-historical constraints), or is it a description of a process (for example, bits, order, matrices), or is it an aesthetic style (for example, non-repetition)? Music scholars will have to navigate these multiple dimensions in the way they have managed the multifaceted concept of fugue: as a genre of baroque keyboard music, as a methodology for building a piece, and as an adjective (‘fugal’) that describes imitative behaviour absent some of the other trappings. A similar situation holds for serialism. To say serialism means only the mid-century acoustic sort relies upon a reified description of genre, process, and aesthetics that is historically and socio-culturally specific. It might be more useful to remember that each of these dimensions is contingent.

Mid-century serialism materialises a particular conglomeration of social, historical, institutional, and aesthetic conditions, a fact which surely needs to be highlighted in the teaching of the topic too. Likewise, there is no need to start saying that EDM and hip hop are serial musics by definition, but it becomes possible to recognise their resonances – via discrete bits, programmed orders, sequencing technologies, loops, and attempts to digitise the analogue – with a serial attitude to music making. Thinking in this way, about serial attitudes and behaviours, demands greater specificity about the socio-economic, aesthetic, and technical trappings of what is colloquially called serial music. Perhaps this technologically mediated specificity will be useful in continuing to navigate music’s digital–analogue dialectic, and in constantly reinventing a serial attitude.