The term ‘Central and Eastern Europe’ used in the title of this chapter should be understood here not merely as a reference to the geopolitical zone stretching from the Oder to the Dnieper rivers, and from the Baltic to the Adriatic and the Black Sea, but also to a category described by sociologists as ‘a community of fates’ (Reference Baehr and RitzerBaehr 2016). The nations, states, and countries of Central and Eastern Europe thus conceived have been subjected to similar (usually external) interventions over the ages; the most significant of these was the experience of twentieth-century totalitarianisms. This context is not without significance for the subject of this chapter. The approach presented here is rooted in the Polish experience, which can be a limitation, but also strongly motivates the author to look at the history of serialism from a comparative perspective.
Before the Second World War
At the time when the foundations of the twelve-tone method were being worked out by Arnold Schoenberg in 1920s Vienna, the musical cultures of countries which were born or revived out of the ruins of the ‘Viennese order’ were undergoing major formative processes. Artists from those countries attempted to define their respective national and ethnic identities, to meet perceptions of international technical-artistic standards in their own music, and to achieve a synthesis of national with seemingly universal elements in their musical language. Modernising that language was inevitably a challenge, in the context of which Schoenberg’s method only had a limited impact. The dominant conviction was that the way to modernity in music, as mapped out by Béla Bartók in Hungary, George Enescu in Romania, and Karol Szymanowski in Poland, should be led by and through adaptations of folklorisms. This focus on national folk musics as the basis for creating a modern musical language was complemented (especially in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary) by attitudes which emphasised ideas of cultural universalism, aimed to overcome the barriers that isolated the national schools and cultures from a more apparently mainstream European tradition, and called for a synthesis of these elements within a neoclassical style.
The idea of going beyond tonality in ways defined by the thought and works of Schoenberg and the entire Viennese School did meet with a response. However, it was only very slowly that ‘composition with twelve tones related only to one another’ took root in Central and Eastern Europe’s musical cultures. At first, Schoenberg’s method made its presence felt almost exclusively in printed commentaries, speculations, and polemics, rather than in actual music. The reception of dodecaphony was much less pronounced than that of the Viennese expressionism or of free atonal writing. Local reactions to the twelve-tone method were determined in each case by geographic context, and the distance separating a given place from Europe’s main (which is to say, above all, German- and French-speaking) cultural centres, as well as by local tradition and cultural heritage. Nevertheless, distrust or even hostility towards this new idea were common nearly everywhere, as was an imprecise and inconsistent understanding of that idea, which led to situations in which even genuine admiration for Schoenberg was not translated into actual attempts to employ his technique (cf. Reference SpurnýSpurný 2005: 4–6).
For instance, in interwar Yugoslavia, the members of the Group of Atonal Composers, active from 1936 to 1941 in Belgrade (and comprising Dimitrije Bivolarević, Milan Ristić, and Petar Stajić), studied the music of Schoenberg and Berg and tried to apply the principles they discovered in that music in their own compositions. Nevertheless, it was only Ristić who embraced those principles to the point of actually employing dodecaphony as such, in such works as, for instance, his First String Quartet (1935) (Reference Milin and LoosMilin 2017: 301). The output of Slovenian composers demonstrates, on the other hand, that even references to the twelve-tone technique either declared by composers (as in the 1929 opera The Chalk Circle by Slavko Osterc and his Mouvement symphonique (1936)) or signalled in the titles (for example, Pavel Šivic’s Twelve-Tone Studies in Form of a Little Piano Suite (1937)) corresponded neither to any analytically demonstrable, consistent use of twelve-tone rows nor to their importance in the overall development of musical structure. What these references actually reflect is an intention to use all the twelve tones of the chromatic scale as the basic music material or the application of a composer’s individual, atonal musical idiom (Reference PompePompe 2018).
In this context, Józef Koffler might be described as one of the first ‘true’ dodecaphonists in East-Central Europe, though Koffler never became Schoenberg’s pupil, nor did he know Schoenberg personally. Koffler’s knowledge of the twelve-tone method was mainly the fruit of his own studies on Schoenberg’s scores (cf. Reference KofflerKoffler 1934). Working in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv in Ukraine), he expressed his enthusiasm for Schoenberg not only in theoretical works and journalistic texts, but also directly in his compositions. In 1926, he wrote his Musique de ballet for piano, a work which inaugurated his dodecaphonic period, which would last till the tragic end of his life, likely murdered after his arrest by the Gestapo in Krosno in 1944. Over the years, he composed, among others, 15 Variations (1927), which was also dedicated to Schoenberg, String Trio (1928), the cantata Die Liebe (1931), and Symphony No. 3 (c. 1935), all of which deployed twelve-tone writing ‘proper’ (Reference GołąbGołąb 2004). In interwar Poland, Lwów was, in fact, practically an enclave of new music, where Koffler found a skilful ally in the composer and pianist Tadeusz Majerski, who, like Webern, made use of palindromic rows. Koffler himself taught harmony and atonal composition at the music conservatory in Lwów. Importantly, the unique quality of Koffler’s twelve-tone music was that it entered into a symbiotic relation with the neoclassical style, especially with respect to musical form and expression.
The Second World War and Its Aftermath
In the years of the Second World War and directly afterwards, the range and intensity of composers’ experimentation with the twelve-tone technique significantly diminished. The change of political context was unsurprisingly a crucial factor after 1945. The Soviet Union subdued a number of European countries, including such former satellites of the Third Reich as Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary, as well as states liberated from German occupation, including Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland. All of these were gradually transformed into so-called ‘people’s democracies’, which were to imitate the Soviet Union in terms of political system and ideology as well. Since all forms of art were converted into instruments of state policy and of ‘engineering the human soul’, the practice of dodecaphony was considered as exploration of ‘formalism’ in music which, albeit very vaguely defined, was a forbidden fruit in the discourse of official ideology, while its authors became targets for repression (Reference TompkinsTompkins 2013: 15–93). In the then-Yugoslavia, the situation was unique in that, under the rule of Josip Broz Tito, from 1948 onwards that country implemented its own version of communism, independent of Stalinist doctrine. The Yugoslav cultural policy of ‘moderated modernism’, in conjunction with a rather less strict isolation from the West, encouraged, at least theoretically, the tendency to adopt more ‘advanced’ techniques and styles of composition. This did not translate, however, into a universal readiness to take up such challenges among the composers (cf. Reference MedićMedić 2007: 285).
Admittedly, experimental tendencies in music were not entirely suppressed in the Eastern Bloc even in the Stalinist period, which may partly be explained by composers naturally seeking to develop their compositional technique and partly by the fact that those responsible for executing official cultural policies did not have sufficient expertise to recognise the ‘subversive’ dodecaphony present in some works. Besides, the composers who introduced the twelve-tone method in these countries were, for the most part, the same artists who had studied or trained abroad in the short post-war ‘transition’ period, even if the ‘new’ techniques were also the subject of informal self-study. Finally, to draw a full picture of the situation, it is also important to consider composers who worked in exile and therefore enjoyed significantly greater creative freedom.
Already in the 1940s, the potential of using chromatic material without tonal centres attracted, for instance, the Polish composer Roman Palester, who most likely drew on the writings of René Leibowitz, which he had studied in Paris. Palester introduced twelve-tone themes in his cantata, The Vistula (1948) and in Sinfonietta (1948–49) for two string orchestras. Following his decision to emigrate more permanently in 1951 (first to Paris, then Munich), his style evolved in the direction of a gradually more and more complete adaptation of the principles of dodecaphony, though invariably he had a tendency to treat those rules rather loosely or to modify them, as is evident, for instance, in his Symphony No. 4 (1948–52). Soon before his emigration to Israel in 1948, another Polish composer, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati (who was, notably, Koffler’s pupil), composed his first string trio, Ricercari (1948), in Webernian vein. Constantin Régamey’s dodecaphonic debut, one of his Persian Songs (1942), on a text by Omar Khayyam, was presented in 1942 during an underground concert held in German-occupied Warsaw. This dissonant piece made a strong impression in the context of the other, neoclassical works performed there.
In the late 1940s, interesting stylistic transformations took place in the works of Bulgarian composers Konstantin Iliev and Lazar Nikolov. The former learned about Schoenberg’s method from Alois Hába and shared this knowledge with Nikolov. Both were looking for their own artistic paths beyond folklorism and tonality. This led to the emergence in 1951 of Bulgaria’s first twelve-tone composition, Iliev’s Second Symphony for winds and percussion. The work is based on quasi-series which take different forms and use various arrangements of intervals. At the same time, Nikolov, who valued the logical aspect of dodecaphony most highly, developed a method of composition based on the principle of dodecaphonic non-repeatability of tones in the horizontal and vertical dimension, but with twelve-tone fields instead of rows (Reference Kujumdzhiev and LoosKujumdzhiev 2017: 279–83).
Vladan Radovanović deserves mention here because of the string quartet which he wrote in 1950, even before he took up composition studies in Belgrade. One of the quartet’s movements, freely dodecaphonic, reflects his fascination with Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 3 (1927) (Reference MilinMilin 2015: 155). Kazimierz Serocki’s Suite of Preludes for piano, composed in 1952 in what he called ‘non-serial twelve-tone technique’, is an intriguing case. It won the first prize in a competition organised in December 1952 by the Polish Composers’ Union to mark the Congress of the Peoples for Peace, then held in Vienna. Paradoxically, Serocki’s mass song, ‘Forest Route’, was also honoured in the same contest.
After Stalin
Stalin’s death in 1953 stirred up decentralist sentiments and tendencies across the entire Eastern Bloc. This process was referred to as ‘the thaw’. Its most turbulent and dramatic moment came in 1956, a date of great significance to all the Soviet-dependent states. Previously, their dependence had been nearly absolute. In 1956, the satellite states obtained some freedom, internal relations became somewhat more democratic, and cultural policies more liberal, though naturally complete liberation from Soviet supervision was impossible.
It was on the rising tide of this thaw that the International Festival of Contemporary Music in Poland was born (first held between 10 and 21 October 1956). Called the Warsaw Autumn from its second occurrence, the festival ended the isolation of Polish musical culture from dialogue with the international world of new music. Its programme in 1956 included not only the works of the classics of dodecaphony (Berg’s Lyric Suite (1925–6) and Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto op. 42 (1942)), but also pieces by the younger generation of Polish composers: Tadeusz Baird’s freely dodecaphonic Cassazione (1956) for orchestra and Kazimierz Serocki’s Sinfonietta (1956) for two string orchestras, which featured twelve-tone themes. These works signalled the current interests of their composers, which for the next several years would centre around attempts to adjust the twelve-tone method to suit their own artistic aims.
Dodecaphony soon won a prominent and widely accepted place in the musical output of Polish composers, to such an extent that listing those who never experimented with that technique would be much easier than enumerating all those who did. Following the first visits of Polish composers to the Darmstadt New Music Courses (beginning in 1957), they also became interested in other avant-garde developments. This step change in contact with the Western European avant-garde meant that several versions of serialism appeared in Polish music at nearly the same time: pieces with rows as thematic material, examples of post-Webernian thinking (such as Serocki’s song cycle Heart of the Night (1956) and Bolesław Szabelski’s Aphorisms 9 for chamber ensemble (1962)), as well as attempts at multiple serialism, including Henryk Mikołaj Górecki’s Scontri (1960) – the title itself a knowing referencing to Luigi Nono’s Incontri (1955), ‘collisions’ rather than ‘encounters’ – and Serocki’s Musica concertante (1958), which was the first of his works to be performed in Darmstadt.
Twelve-tone technique was also combined with aleatoricism and with open form, as in Górecki’s Three Diagrams for solo flute (1959) and Palester’s Varianti for two pianos (1964). Such combinations are typical of the so-called 1960s ‘Polish School’, along with the form-building role of ‘purely sonorous’ values, characteristic of the sonoristic technique. Sometimes, sonoristics was combined with the use of twelve-tone rows for pitch organisation (as in the opening of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Quartetto per archi No. 1 (1960) and in Wojciech Kilar’s Riff 62 for orchestra (1962)). In other pieces, sonoristic sound structures were themselves subject to serially derived transformations (in, for instance, Górecki’s Monodramma (1963) and Kilar’s Diphtongos (1964)) (cf. Reference GranatGranat 2008; Reference Lindstedt and MantzouraniLindstedt 2013). It must be stressed, however, that such frequently very complex constructivist procedures were not aurally perceptible and, moreover, played little part in defining the style of the ‘Polish School’. It was, eventually, the strong expressive qualities of this music, based on the primacy of sound colour, and its distinctiveness from the mainstream of the Western avant-garde, that the critics appreciated (Reference LindstedtLindstedt 2018).
Finally, a special kind of twelve-tone serialism appears in the music of Witold Lutosławski. It was accompanied by a declaration of his absolute independence from dodecaphony in what he regarded as its doctrinaire version and also by a fundamental criticism of Schoenberg’s method: ‘What is alien to me in Schoenberg is the preeminence of the system over listening to the music’ (Lutosławski in Reference VargaVarga 1976: 17). At the same time, from the mid-1950s onwards, Lutosławski’s pitch organisation was based on uniquely formed twelve-tone rows (which comprised a limited number of intervals, arranged into twenty-four-tone cycles) in combination with twelve-tone chords and ‘assigned notes’, that is, released from being fixed to a particular register of the chord and allocated to a single instrument (Reference Homma and SkowronHomma 2001).
Notably, despite the difference in local conditions, the reception of serial techniques in the entire Eastern Bloc after 1956 was dominated by rather similar approaches. Any desire for integration with the Western European avant-garde and its current problems came to be associated with the need to study and master the dodecaphonic technique developed by Schoenberg as many as three decades earlier. As a consequence of such a sense of the need to catch up, the serial method was simultaneously undergoing transformations and individualisation across Eastern and Central Europe. Moreover, the accumulation of avant-garde techniques in the works of Central European composers was accompanied by a need for an aesthetic and expressive self-definition, especially with respect to a sense of authenticity and a desire for original solutions. The Warsaw Autumn played a major role in transmitting the ideas of new music, because for visitors to the festival who lived on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, it played the role of a window to the world. Importantly in this context, the early years of the Warsaw Autumn saw a gradual extension of the range of repertoire, from an initial primary focus on contemporary classics to a more and more comprehensive representation of the current output of composers working worldwide (Reference JakelskiJakelski 2017).
In Czechoslovakia, interest in dodecaphony erupted in the late 1950s and early 1960s, manifesting itself in adaptations both of Schoenberg and Berg’s procedures to create thematic processes and also of Webern’s pointillism. However, impulses flowing from the Viennese School present in the works of such composers were usually taken up in a modified form in Prague (for instance, Jan Klusák, Zbynek Vostrák, Marek Kopelent, and Luboš Fišer), Brno (Pavel Blatny, Alois Piňos, Josef Berg, Miloslav Ištvan, and Arnošt Parsch), and Bratislava (Vladimír Bokes, Ivan Hrušovski, Roman Berger, Juraj Beneš, and Juraj Hatrík). What was special about the local scene was a gradual transition from twelve-tone to multiple serialism in the sphere of music material. One of the most interesting phenomena was the theory and practice of ‘tone groups’ developed by Piňos, based on his own principles of interval selection, of forming sequences of intervals, and building groups out of the notes in a row. This concept, which appeared in Piňos’s music in the late 1950s and early 1960s, attained its mature form in Conflicts for violin, bass clarinet, piano, and percussion (1964). Ištvan, on the other hand, not only combined dodecaphony with modality (as in the Odyssey of a Child from Lidice (1963)), but also proposed the idea of ‘diatonised seriality’ (in the 1980s) (cf. Reference ŠtědroňŠtědroň 1984).
The history of serialism in Romania demonstrates how powerful the pressure of official ideology could be with respect to new phenomena in music, and how composing Western-style ‘formalist’ works could be viewed as a rebellion against the imposed restrictions. Censors counted the notes in melodic lines in search of the forbidden twelve. The young generation of Romanian composers (including Ştefan Niculescu, Anatol Vieru, Tiberiu Olah, Dan Constantinescu, Myriam Marbé, and Aurel Stroe) responded by concealing their formulas in ways which proved very hard to decipher. Constantinescu, one of those who used serialism consistently, later developed his own free way of working in this mode, which did not exclude tonal elements (as in Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra (1963), subsequently combining it with ideas borrowed from aleatoricism (Variations for violin, viola, cello, and piano (1966)) (Reference Sandu-DediuSandu-Dediu 2007).
However, the essential aspect of avant-garde transformations in Romania concerned mathematics, which enabled composers to create a kind of alternative to serialism (and aleatoricism too), as well as to continue the folkloric traditions in music. Ştefan Niculescu, for instance, moved from dodecaphony to a concept of heterophony, which he developed and described on the example of Enescu’s Chamber Symphony (1954). From 1965 onwards, this concept, regulated by mathematical criteria, became a consistent element of his musical language, implemented in particularly interesting fashion in his orchestral Heteromorphy (1967). Anatol Vieru, in turn, worked out a complex modal system based mainly on set theory and experimented in the field of musical time (Reference SzilagyiSzilagyi 2016: 299).
In the new music of former Yugoslavia, the twelve-tone method made its most significant early appearance in 1960, when at the 2nd Assembly of the Union of Yugoslav Composers Milko Kelemen put forward his thesis that embracing dodecaphony was a matter of historical and dialectical necessity (Reference MilinMilin 2015: 157). The 1st Muzički Biennale Zagreb, held a year later and founded by Kelemen, symbolically opened a new stage in the history of new music in Yugoslavia. Kelemen’s Études contrapuntiques for wind quintet (1958) and Ruben Radica’s Lyrical Variations for strings (1961) were the earliest twelve-tone compositions in Croatia. For Radica, dodecaphony became a regular point of reference: the style he developed, though original, must be interpreted in the context of the intellectual and aesthetic legacy of the Viennese School. In Kelemen’s case, his wide interests led him from post-Webernian technique (including an attempt to combine a twelve-tone row with the intervallic structures of folk material in Five Essays for string quartet (1959)) to his own approach to the creative transformation of serialism (Reference Sedak and LoosSedak 2017).
In the 1950s, Serbian composers already showed interest in twelve-tone technique, as is evident from such examples as Dušan Kostić’s First String Quartet (1954) and Symphony in sol (1957), as well as Ljubica Marić’s Byzantine Concerto for piano and orchestra (1959). In the first movement of the last, special treatment of modal hexachords signifies Marić’s entry into the field of twelve-tone music (Reference MasnikosaMasnikosa 2009: 26). Works comprising at least some elements of dodecaphony became more frequent in the early 1960s, including, to mention only a few, Milan Ristić’s Symphony No. 3 (1961) as well as Aleksandar Obradović’s Symphony No. 2 (1961) and Epitaph H (1965) (Reference Milin and RomanouMilin 2009: 90). The encounter between Serbian music and the West European avant-garde resulted in a critical reinterpretation of a wide spectrum of compositional techniques and procedures, from twelve-tone technique and multiple serialism, through the sonoristics and aleatoricism of the Polish School, to Ligeti’s micro-polyphony. These phenomena were particularly strongly marked in the works of composers born in the 1930s, such as Petar Ozgijan, Vladan Radovanović, Rajko Maksimović, and Zoran Hristić. On the basis of the twelve-tone method, Ozgijan developed his own system of pitch organisation, uniquely deployed in each composition (such as Meditations for two pianos, strings, and percussion (1962) and his Concerto for Orchestra ‘Sillhouettes’ (1963)). Independent of other multiple serial approaches, Radovanović created his own method of controlling all the musical parameters based on the idea of hyper-polyphony (as seen in, for instance, Sphaeroön (1960–4)) (Reference MedićMedić 2019: 167). An example of a creative adaptation of multiple serialism can be found, in turn, in the Hexagons cycle (1975–8), by another Serbian composer, Srđan Hofman.
One of the first Slovenian composers to have taken up dodecaphony was Lucijan Marija Škerjanc (in his Seven Twelve-Tone Fragments (1958)). A wider group of artists experimenting with that technique soon emerged, which included Primož Ramovš, Alojz Srebotnjak, Dane Škerl, Pavel Šivic, Igor Štuhec, Danilo Švara, Darijan Božič, Pavle Merkù, Jakob Jež, and others. The ways and extent to which they adopted dodecaphony (as well as the degree of its ‘strictness’) differed significantly in each case and ranged from the use of twelve-tone themes (by, for instance, Dane Škerl in his Symphony No. 2 (1963)) through free twelve-note writing (in, amongst others, Božidar Kantušer’s Alternations (1963) and Jakob Jež’s Pastoral Inventions (1961)), to strict twelve-tone serialism. The earliest twelve-tone compositions in Slovenia included Švara’s Three Dodecaphonic Etudes for solo violin (1966) and Ramovš’s Contrasts for piano trio (1961), while the music of Alojz Srebotnjak (as in Six Pieces for bassoon and piano (1964)) exemplifies a precise and coherent application of Schoenberg’s technique (cf. Reference PompePompe 2018: 99–109). With time, however, Slovenian composers’ contacts with the international avant-garde shifted their interests, as in other countries, towards extended performance techniques and aleatoricism.
The specificities of Schoenberg’s method’s reception in Hungary are related to the fact that, until the end of the 1950s, Hungarian composers saw Bartók’s oeuvre as their main point of reference. Through the agency of the theoretical writings of Ernő Lendvai, Bartók offered them a modern musical language whose complexity and degree of structural unification were comparable to those of dodecaphony. However, the twelve-tone technique had already appeared, beginning in the 1940s, in the works of Hungarian émigré composers such as István Anhalt and Mátyás Seiber. Endre Szervánszky was the first in the country to take up the twelve-tone method. His abstract, pointillist Six Pieces for Orchestra (1959) caused an ideological scandal but simultaneously paved the way to modernist trends for the younger generations of composers. From the same year, György Kurtág’s String Quartet op. 1 (1959), which combines ostinato technique with twelve-tone aggregates, testifies to the modernisation of Hungarian music. In the 1960s such composers as Endre Székely, Gábor Darvas, Rudolf Maros, András Szőllősy, Zsolt Durkó, and Sándor Szokolay drew on elements of dodecaphony and multiple serialism, as well as the aleatoricism and sonorism of the Polish School, which frequently led to the already mentioned tendency towards, on the one hand, an accumulation of the techniques of others, allied with, on the other, individualistic uses and developments of those approaches (Reference KroóKroó 1982).
I turn, last, to the situation in the Baltic countries, which, after 1945, were annexed to the Soviet Union. In Lithuania, the twelve-tone technique was first applied in the second movement of Benjaminas Gorbulskis’s Clarinet Concerto (1959). However, the first truly dodecaphonic work (that is, based on a row) written by a Lithuanian composer was completed in Boston, in the shape of Julius Gaidelis’s Trio for violin, clarinet, and bassoon (1961). In later years Lithuanian composers were inclined to synthesise dodecaphony with the ideas of aleatoricism, pointillism, collage and minimalism (Reference Daunoravičienė and LoosDaunoravičienė 2017). However, arguably the most sophisticated attempt to individualise the principles of twelve-tone music was Osvaldas Balakauskas’s system of ‘dodecatonics’. Its essence stemmed from combining the idea of chromatic completeness with the idea of tonal centre to constitute a kind of ‘tonal seriality’ (cf. Reference DaunoravičienėDaunoravičienė 2018). In 1960s Latvia, the symphonies of Jānis Ivanovs and the works of Romualds Grīnblats came close to the twelve-tone technique; the latter composer’s Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (1970), based on serial principles, was banned by Soviet censors during the decade following its composition (Reference KudinšKudinš 2018). In Estonia, the first dodecaphonic piece was Arvo Pärt’s Nekrolog (1962), while his Diagramme for piano (1964) combined serialism with aleatoricism and graphic notation. Another Estonian artist working with serial and aleatory techniques at that time was Kuldar Sink, composer of, among others piece, Five Haikus for soprano and string quartet (1964) and Compositions for two pianos (1966) (Reference KautnyKautny 2002: 34).
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The Central and Eastern European experience evidences a more or less direct impact by the Viennese School’s twelve-tone tradition on the majority of twentieth-century composers. That tradition was significant and intensely exploited for some time. It yielded many works which testify to its popularity, but also to its adaptability, since it underwent modifications and was approached in various unorthodox ways. Moreover, in this part of Europe, the motivations for serial practices clearly transcend the stereotypical cult of novelty and progress. The composers were not seeking novelty for its own sake. Being aware of their entanglement in (primarily national) traditions, they aimed to reinterpret those traditions using the most modern means available. At the same time, they also aspired to become members by right of the international new music community, which both symbolically and literally connected artists across the boundaries of the Cold War.
Undoubtedly, access to modern musical ideas was delayed and hindered by the common Central and Eastern European historical circumstances. As such, no simple linear or organic development can be observed in the history of serialism in this region. The picture is instead characterised by sudden leaps, a great variety of individual approaches, and a unique ‘colouring’ related to local contexts. One might say that Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and so on each had their own distinct approach to serialism; few composers from this part of Europe could be labelled as ‘strict’ serialists. Most importantly, however, when the mechanisms which guaranteed a hierarchy of musical parameters had been abolished, and the need appeared to restore in music form-building elements, composers throughout the Eastern Bloc very actively joined in the creative effort to overcome the crisis. Taking this into account, one might conclude that, had there been no serialism in Central and Eastern Europe, there would have been, amongst other things, no Polish sonorism either.
