Preliminaries

In 1924, one year after Arnold Schoenberg finished composing his first work entirely based on twelve-tone technique (Suite for Piano op. 25, 1921–3), Erwin Stein presented the main principles of this method in an article for the leading avant-garde periodical Musikblätter des Anbruch, in an issue celebrating the fiftieth birthday of his former teacher (Reference SteinStein 1924). Following Schoenberg’s and his circle’s claim that the newly invented method reduced free atonality to a mere transitionary phenomenon, critics and composers alike started to equate atonality with dodecaphony from that moment onwards. Whereas Schoenberg believed that his invention would ensure the predominance of German music for the next fifty years, in practice he lost a great deal of external support for atonality now understood as ‘constructivist’ dodecaphony. Béla Bartók, not the least of his fellow modernist composers, is a case in point. In an essay written in 1920, Bartók begins with the statement that the music of our time has resolutely moved in the direction of atonality; by 1927, he rejects the now contaminated concept of atonality (Reference BartókBartók 1920; Reference BeckerBecker 1927). For composers undeterred by twelve-tone works and their critical reception, getting to know the intricacies and aesthetic potential of the method was not that easy. Schoenberg had moved to the United States after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, hardly a decade after Stein’s article. Alban Berg had died in 1935, another protagonist of serial music Ernst Krenek had fled to America in 1938, and the cultural and political climate leading to the Second World War, the hardships of that war, and its aftermath turned the period between 1933 and 1947 into a time during which it was difficult to get first-hand knowledge of serialism and sometimes even dangerous to put it into practice.

In view of this, it comes as no surprise that twenty or more years had to pass before twelve-tone techniques were adopted in Western Europe outside of the Viennese circle. Examples from Italy, Belgium, and the United Kingdom suffice to make the point. The very first Italian dodecaphonic piece was the Serenata (1941–2) by Camillo Togni (Reference Rizzardi and DelaereRizzardi 2011, 46), soon to be followed by Luigi Dallapiccola’s Cinque Frammenti di Saffo (1942–3) and the penetrating opera Il prigioniero (1944–8). In Belgium, Louis De Meester’s Variations for 2 Pianos (1947) and Pierre Froidebise’s chamber cantata Amercoeur (1948) were the earliest examples, before Norbert Rosseau would create a more substantial body of twelve-tone works between 1949 and 1975 (Reference DelaereDelaere 1998: 15–22). Elisabeth Lutyens is considered to be the first composer of serial music in the United Kingdom, exploring its techniques progressively from the Chamber Concerto op. 8.1 in 1939 to the Motet, based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in 1953 (Reference RupprechtRupprecht 2017: 39–47). Philip Rupprecht recalls Lutyens’s self-analysis of her historical position: ‘[I had an] odd experience in the late 1950s: until then I was regarded as too modern to be played, then overnight I was an old “fuddy-duddy”’ (Reference RupprechtRupprecht 2017: 39). She was not the only composer to fall victim of such criticism. By the early 1950s, Schoenberg was proclaimed dead as a role model for the younger generation, and his opera Moses und Aron (1932) was decried as ‘serial Verdi’ (Reference BoulezBoulez 1966a; Reference GoeyvaertsGoeyvaerts 1994: 46). These and similar descriptions can be partly explained by the generation gap, but they assuredly also stem from young composers’ disappointment that Schoenberg had failed to develop serial technique since he left Europe in 1933. They perceived Schoenberg’s intention to base thematic-motivic development and traditional musical forms on the tone row as a misjudgement of the row’s potential to create emphatically new music. From that moment around 1950 onwards, ‘serialism’ came to be understood as ‘multiple serialism’, as distinct from more traditional dodecaphonic procedures.

This chapter offers a broad and necessarily incomplete overview of serialism thus redefined and practised in Western Europe between 1950 and 1975, specifically excluding those protagonists who have separate chapters in this volume devoted to their individual practices. The end date is motivated by the development of spectral music in France, the widespread reception of minimal music in Europe – both events challenging serialism as the only avant-garde musical movement up to then in Europe – and the emergence of postmodernism – challenging the very idea of an avant-garde – around that time.

Origins

Any account of the history of European serial music focuses on a twofold origin: the (dodecaphonic) music of Anton Webern and the teaching and compositions of Olivier Messiaen. Key themes in the narrative around Webern’s twin role as a source of inspiration and as the historical legitimation of serialism include a structuralist instead of thematic approach to the tone row, the creation of (unique) musical forms derived from the row, the importance of symmetry and reduction, the first attempts at extending the serial principle to other sound dimensions, and more generally an emphasis on sonority, all of which are opposed to Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic practice. The 1953 New Music Courses in Darmstadt offered Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Karel Goeyvaerts, and Luigi Nono the opportunity to pointedly discuss Webern’s importance for their own work. Their statements and analyses were presented in radio programmes and published in journals such as Die Reihe, all contributing to the establishment of the image of Webern as the forefather of serial music.

The second origin invariably invoked is Messiaen’s analysis class at the Paris Conservatoire. The list of enrolled students includes protagonists of the earliest generation of serialists such as Boulez, Michel Fano, Jean Barraqué, Goeyvaerts, and Stockhausen. Messiaen explained to them that music could be conceived starting from parameters of sound other than pitch, such as rhythm or tone colour (see Reference DelaereDelaere 2002). The creative leap realised by these youngsters was, then, to combine Webern’s serial techniques and aesthetics with Messiaen’s parametric thinking, so the story goes. In spite of rebuttals, such as Richard Toop’s, made as early as 1974 (Reference ToopToop 1974), histories of twentieth-century music continue to mention Messiaen’s ‘Mode de valeurs et d’intensités’ (1949) from the Quatre Études de rythme for piano as a catalyst or even first example of serial music, even though it is obviously a work based on a modal scale with tones empirically selected, rather than a series with a fixed order of non-repeated tones. It is remarkable that the final movement ‘Île de feu 2’ (1950) from the same collection has hitherto gone unnoticed as a better candidate to fulfil the historical position ascribed to ‘Mode’ (Figures 12.1a and b).

Figures 12.1a and b O. Messiaen, ‘Île de feu 2’ (scale subjected to permutation) and ‘Île de feu 2’, bb. 8–27.

© Durand S.A.

Messiaen starts from an ascending chromatic scale from C to B and a descending durational scale from to. Each pitch–rhythm combination has a fixed articulation and intensity, as was the case in ‘Mode’. By contrast with the latter, however, ‘Île de feu 2’ has sections in which the scale is systematically permutated, following a matrix that starts from the middle and moves to the outer values: 7 – 6 – 8 – 5 – 9 – 4 – 10 – 3 – 11 – 2 – 12 – 1. This matrix yields ten different permutations, in the end returning to the original order, hence a cyclical permutation process (Reference MessiaenMessiaen 1994–2004, iii, 165–7). Five sections in the piano work entirely consist of a combination of two permutations, one in each hand. The layout of the scale and matrix results in distinctive patterns, with permutation 1 presenting an all-interval series in open fan form, permutation 2 a succession of augmented fourths, permutation 3 a succession of minor thirds, with permutations 2 and 3 having increasing intervals linking the main interval.

Stockhausen and Goeyvaerts were particularly struck by the ‘punctual’ style of the ‘Mode’ when they first heard a recording of the piece in Darmstadt in 1951 (Reference GoeyvaertsGoeyvaerts 1994: 45–6). They would soon develop strategies comparable to those Messiaen applied to the ‘Mode’: precomposition (drawing up an inventory of the musical material); starting from absolute values (rather than, for instance in the domain of rhythm, from the subdivision of a metrical unit); and involving four parameters in the set-up. Unlike the ‘Mode’, however, the five permutation sections from ‘Île de feu 2’ present an equal distribution of the absolute values and have a matrix which regulates their order. Why then did the young serialists and subsequent literature fail to appreciate the eminently serial nature of this work and mistakenly invoke the ‘Mode’ as precursor or first example of European serial music? The answer to that question lies in the other sections of ‘Île de feu 2’, which are inspired by Messiaen’s notion of Papua New Guinea’s folk music (see the tempo indication ‘Vif et féroce’). These other sections gain in importance, increasingly flooding the abstract serial islets with wild, virtuosic, hammered, ostinato-based Bartókian waves.

It is often overlooked that other, arguably less decisive but certainly more surprising, sources of inspiration than Webern and Messiaen had an impact on the establishment of serialism. Paul Hindemith’s ‘Reihe 2’ from his textbook Unterweisung im Tonsatz served as a model for Bruno Maderna’s and Luigi Nono’s attempt to determine the degree of relative tension (and thus the expressive value) of the intervals defined in the series. Once again, a productive misunderstanding steers the course of music history: Hindemith’s diatonicised chromaticism signals a return to tonal principles rather than the foundation stone of twelve-tone music it was mistaken for by the Italian composers. Moreover, Nono did not share the disrespect for Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic music expressed by his fellow serialists. Even before marrying Schoenberg’s daughter Nuria in 1955, Nono had based his Variazione canoniche for orchestra (1950) on the series of the Ode to Napoleon op. 41. Likewise, the composers of A Survivor from Warsaw op. 46 and Il canto sospeso can certainly be considered kindred spirits. Finally, Nono made an in-depth analysis of his father-in-law’s dodecaphonic masterpiece, the Variations for Orchestra op. 31 in 1956 (Reference EmmeryEmmery 2019). Boulez had declared Schoenberg dead, but Stravinsky was there to stay for him, at least Stravinsky up until 1920. A comparison of Boulez’s and Messiaen’s analyses of The Rite of Spring (1913) shows to what extent Boulez interpreted Stravinsky through his teacher’s lens, but also how foundational the Russian composer was for the emergence of the serial idea (Reference BoulezBoulez 1966b; Reference MessiaenMessiaen 1994–2004, ii, 91–147). Also, one should not forget the importance of Claude Debussy’s music for conceptions of form developed within serialism. Stockhausen significantly entitled his essay on statistical form and group composition ‘From Webern to Debussy’, including analytical observations on Jeux, the cult work in these circles (Stockhausen 1963f). Barraqué’s keen analytical studies on Debussy say as much about his own composition of musical form as a ceaseless becoming (‘devenir’) as they do about his predecessor (Reference Barraqué and WeberBarraqué 1962; Reference Barraqué and FeneyrouBarraqué 2001). Both the Italian serialists and Goeyvaerts had intimate knowledge of medieval and Renaissance music, in which they either uncovered or projected parallels with serial practice (Reference Drees and DobszayDrees 2003; Goeyvaerts 2010a). Finally, Pascal Decroupet has convincingly shown that the self-declared distance of serial composers from musique concrète can hardly obliterate the common ground they share with Pierre Schaeffer’s method of transforming and layering acoustic data, in addition to providing composers such as Boulez, Messiaen, Michel Philippot, Barraqué, Fano, and Stockhausen their first hands-on practical experiences in an electro-acoustic music studio (Reference Decroupet and DelaereDecroupet 2011).

Geographies

In presenting some of the main composers by country, this chapter follows the geographical perspective on the history of serial music taken within this part of the volume. In doing so, one has nevertheless to keep in mind that European serial music as defined in this chapter was arguably the most international movement there has ever been in music. The Darmstadt New Music Courses were the most important international gathering place (see Reference Borio and DanuserBorio and Danuser 1997 and Reference IddonIddon 2013), but serialists also met at music festivals such as Donaueschingen and at radio stations, especially when they hosted an electro-acoustic music studio, as in Paris, Cologne, or Milan. Composers showed and discussed their scores with colleagues from abroad during these gatherings, and the main protagonists engaged in intensive correspondence with their peers. The dedicated periodical Die Reihe had an international authorship (see Reference GrantGrant 2001). Building a new language and aesthetics from scratch necessitated extensive international contacts, which were undoubtedly also fuelled by the post-war aversion to the nationalist ideologies that had led to the catastrophe of the Second World War.

France, and more specifically Paris, proved to be once again the birthplace of an ars nova, that of European serialism. In addition to Messiaen’s analysis class, the teachings of René Leibowitz during the mid-1940s and his subsequent publications were influential in this respect. Leibowitz initiated the new generation of French composers into dodecaphonic techniques, while at the same time unintentionally creating considerable distance from the aesthetics of the Second Viennese School. Boulez undoubtedly was the strongest artistic personality among the youngsters, but it would be a mistake to narrow serialism in France to his oeuvre. Many other composers, such as Barraqué, Fano, Philippot, Gilbert Amy, or Jean-Claude Éloy, used serial techniques as well and added practices and expressivities of their own to the general picture of serialism. This is certainly true for Barraqué, who, in addition to numerous incomplete or unacknowledged scores, produced six very substantial works during his short life (see Reference HenrichHenrich 1997). In spite of serialism’s inherent tendency towards fragmentation, Barraqué sought to overcome the short, Webern-like condensed formal types to create vast architectural forms of considerable duration. His Piano Sonata (1950–2) is a case in point. The score mentions a duration of approximately forty minutes, but performances aiming to realise the desired clarity and expressivity generally run to fifty minutes or more. Two sections follow each other without interruption, the first alternating four fast, the second four slow tempi. Metronome markings are lacking altogether, indicating that the eight degrees of speed are merely relative to another (which explains the divergent performance timings). In addition, Barraqué distinguishes between a ‘free style’ at the beginning of the work and a more ‘rigid style’ later on, in which tempi and dynamics are to be observed strictly, yielding (mostly two-part) contrapuntal textures of points and lines. Beethoven and Debussy are often invoked when dealing with Barraqué’s concept of musical form. In principle, these two formal models seem incompatible, but Barraqué succeeds in combining large-scale dimensions with flexible formal functions resulting from the interpenetration of loose and tight textures. In other words, Barraqué creates a compelling musical form of vast dimensions through a succession of unstable and highly contrasting fragments. Paul Griffiths speaks, in an imagined conversation with the deceased composer, as follows:

Together with this specific formal concept (and in a way resulting from it), the dramatic intensity created by the rapid alternation of short rhythmic cells and extreme registers and dynamics constitutes Barraqué’s individual contribution to the history of serial music. From 1956 onwards, he directed this artistic programme towards the realisation of a ‘super-work’ based on Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil (1945). Some parts of this envisaged magnum opus such as the cantatas Le Temps Restitué (1956–68) and … au delà du hasard (1958–9) were completed. Others were left unfinished.

After having attended Messiaen’s analysis class and established a personal and musical relationship with Barraqué and Boulez, Fano rejected his juvenilia and participated in the development of multiple serialism. This resulted in two works only, but their sheer quality and early historic position justify Fano’s place in the canon of European serialism. His Sonata for 2 Pianos (1952) was first discussed by Richard Toop, who interpreted this work as the missing link between Messiaen’s ‘Mode’ and Boulez’s Structures I (Reference ToopToop 1974). More recently, a detailed analysis of the Sonata’s serial organisation of pitch, register, duration, and dynamics has demonstrated that in spite of some technical resemblances, Fano’s two-piano work distinguishes itself from Boulez’s ‘automatic writing’ in creating musical phrases that allow for the perception of a distinct musical form (Reference Decroupet and DelaereLeleu and Decroupet 2011). Fano’s Étude for 15 Instruments (1952) was long considered lost until, in 2019, Max Erwin produced a transcript of this seminal work. The opening page shown in Figure 12.2, which I reproduce with gratitude to both Fano and Erwin, shows the ‘punctual style’ typical of the earliest phase in serial composition. There is a strong tendency towards Webernian ‘organic chromaticism’ (Reference PousseurPousseur 1955), the simultaneous or successive sounding of a pitch with one of its chromatic neighbours. The careful elaboration of the tone and rest durations is obvious, as is the punctual characterisation of degrees of loudness. Compared to the Sonata, modes of attack and sound colour are now included in the serial organisation as well. It is obvious from the large number of works for solo or two pianos that serial composers initially eschewed the serial manipulation of the least controllable sound parameter. Indeed, the composition of timbre is arguably the most remarkable aspect from the Étude. As can be seen from its opening page, this work is not ‘for 15 instruments’ at all but rather ‘for 15 families of timbres’. Most of the string and brass instruments have muted and unmuted family members. Instrumental timbres are subtly modified either during the attack or sustain phase (see for instance the viola and violin entries, respectively the piccolo clarinet and saxophone, or the horns–clarinet–trumpet timbre shifts), thus betraying an acquaintance with technical procedures from Pierre Schaeffer’s electro-acoustic music studio.

Figure 12.2 Michel Fano, Étude for 15 instruments, bb. 1–10

(sounds as written)

What if you just missed the pioneering years of serialism because you were born ten years later than the main protagonists? Gilbert Amy confirms the recurrent music historical phenomenon that priority is not the main issue, even in a period obsessed with ideas of progress and anxiety of influence. In works such as Antiphonies (1960–3) and Diaphonies (1962), his experience as orchestral conductor allowed him to elaborate upon the writing for spatially distributed orchestral groups explored in Stockhausen’s Gruppen (1955–7). During the 1960s and 1970s, Amy produced a number of works that are closely related to Boulez’s mobile form (and his Third Piano Sonata from 1955–7 in particular), but which add distinctive characteristics of his own. Jeux for one to four oboists (1970) is a good example. Its main title refers to a proclaimed forefather of serialism (Debussy), and its subtitles reflect (‘Trope’) or seemingly anticipate (‘Répons’) works by Boulez. Compared to Boulez, Amy leaves slightly more options for the interpreters to assemble the different components of the piece (see Reference MichelMichel 2011).

Both in time and in place, Belgium acted as a pivot in the history of Western European serialism. Together with Boulez – albeit completely differently – Goeyvaerts was the first to combine Messiaen’s teachings with Webern’s serial procedures in the middle movements of his Nr. 1 Sonata for Two Pianos (1950–1). He presented the results during the 1951 Darmstadt New Music Courses to the participants of a seminar conducted by a perplexed Theodor W. Adorno. Stockhausen was intrigued by the Belgian’s musical ideas, to the extent that he too wanted to move immediately to Paris in order to attend Messiaen’s analysis class. The ensuing extensive correspondence between the two young composers displays a bewildering mixture of topics including compositional procedures, issues with performances, electro-acoustic music technology, Neoplatonic aesthetics, dogmatic Catholic faith, and personal emotional outbursts (Reference Misch and DelaereMisch and Delaere 2017). An occasional slip of the pen notwithstanding, Goeyvaerts put his concept of the ‘synthetic number’, the addition of four parametrical values yielding the ‘perfect number seven’ for each and every sound, into practice in the Sonata’s middle movements. While the Sonata’s outer movements have a less strict organisation and contain hints of traditional harmonic and expressive gestures, Goeyvaerts’s Nr. 2 for 13 Instruments, composed between August and September 1951, has a strong case for being said to be the first entirely serial work in Europe. Symmetry is a guiding principle in these and the following serial works, together with equal distribution of the musical material. By contrast, serial order is not important to him. The consistent use of octave doublings to mark the symmetry axis of Nr. 2 is another example of the idiosyncrasies of his mode of approaching serialism. In the ensuing works, the musical texture is reduced to a bare minimum. In Nr. 3 with bowed and struck tones (1952) each sound is followed by a pause, and in Nr. 4 with dead tones from the same year, four electronic sound complexes are invariably repeated, and the duration of the pauses between them are varied according to a serial scheme, creating a ‘phase-shifting’ process avant la lettre. From this moment onwards, electro-acoustic music was the only true form of serialism for Goeyvaerts. His Nr. 5 with pure tones (1953) attempts to include timbre in the serial fabric. On the whole, Goeyvaerts is arguably the most radical serialist, less inclined to compromise in his relentless effort to create ‘pure’ music, as he wrote to Stockhausen on 4 August 1953:

While Goeyvaerts would eventually acknowledge the discrepancy between conceived and perceived musical structures after hearing the, to him disappointing, results of the studio production of Nr. 5, such a discrepancy was no concern at all for Herman Van San. Based on the first complete study of the archival material, Reference ErwinMax Erwin (2019) arrives at a work list of fourteen extant compositions from the period 1948 to 1958. The succession shows a development from mainstream dodecaphonic techniques to the serialisation of – ultimately – all parameters by way of an identical mathematical formula, a principle called ‘isomorphy’ by Van San. The electro-acoustic music Geometrische Patterns (1956), alternatively entitled ‘Secundum Opus Electronicum Mathematicum’ is his last completed score. After that and until 1972, he conceived other electro-acoustic works, apparently without the intention to complete or to realise them. The sketches consist of mathematical equations, algorithms and theories from physics, chemistry and cybernetics only: ‘Yet the fact that Van San did not even care to pursue a realisation, however unlikely, of such theories, suggests that he intended his work to exist in a theoretical form, and that these compositions – if compositions they are – will remain in their current state as nearly indecipherable equations’ (Reference ErwinErwin 2019: 199). In a series of articles, Van San construed a teleological historical narrative from Schoenberg’s atonality to ‘mathematic serialism’ and ‘cybernetic music’. His self-construction as a pioneering composer at the culminating point of this development is not only misleading because of the consistent backdating of all of his manuscripts. By being the only serial composer not interested in how his music sounds, Van San simply finds himself outside of this development.

In contrast to Van San, Henri Pousseur is at the centre of serialism as a musical movement with clear artistic ambitions. In general, one could describe his trajectory as starting from the narrowest to the broadest position within the serial project. At the start of his career, Pousseur took Webern as the exclusive model for the development of serialism, resulting in compositions such as the Quintette à la mémoire de Webern (1955), displaying a high degree of organic chromaticism. In response to Stockhausen and Boulez, Pousseur became aware quite early that indeterminacy is not necessarily the opposite of serialism but that it could be one of its operational strategies. It is nevertheless remarkable that his first use of aleatoric procedures occurred in the context of a tape composition, considering that electro-acoustic music came into being to gain full control over the sound material and the resulting musical form. Scambi (1957) consists of thirty-two sequences – all derived from white noise – with different speed and register characteristics and degrees of continuity, to be assembled anew for each performance (Reference SabbeSabbe 1977: 172–6). Later on, Paraboles–Mix (1972) was from the outset more radically conceived as multichannel improvisations based upon previous tape compositions. From the 1960s onwards, Pousseur became increasingly concerned with the harmonic restrictions of serialism. In keeping with one of the fundamental ideas of the serial project, he aimed to include different harmonic states between extreme values, or in his words: ‘how can we rhyme Monteverdi with Webern?’ He created two-dimensional networks of cyclic intervals in which the changing of an interval axis brings about a shift in harmonic region. This ‘apotheosis’ of (tonal) harmony allows for integrating pentatonic, modal, tonal, whole-tone or atonal pitch collections in one and the same work (Reference PousseurPousseur 1968). Particularly impressive examples are the orchestral work Couleurs croisées (1967) in which the human-rights protest song ‘We Shall Overcome’ is harmonically transformed, and the opera Votre Faust (1961–8) in which musical quotations from the past are integrated in the all-embracing, inclusive harmonic system. For the last part of the opera, Pousseur composed several alternative scenes, allowing the public democratically to decide how the opera should end. A work such as Modèle réduit (1975) also shows his desire to prefigure an anti-authoritarian society through musical practice.

The combination of musical and political activism is of course also of the essence for Luigi Nono, without any doubt the key figure of serial music in Italy. But other Italian composers participated in serial adventures at a relatively early stage as well. Bruno Maderna was for a long time primarily known for his activities as a conductor and teacher, but thanks to recent publications we also begin to understand the quality and specificity of his serial compositions (see Reference Mathon, Feneyrou and FerrariMathon, Feneyrou, and Ferrari 2007). Maderna led a ‘workshop’ in Venice modelled after Renaissance studios in which artists elaborated projects collectively. He shared the shifting technique developed by him with brothers-in-arms such as Nono and Luciano Berio; Franco Donatoni and Aldo Clementi count among later composers influenced by him. The technique is based on magic squares that generate complexes of derived series in which vertical groups and ‘voids’ (that is, pauses) also result from the shifting process (see Reference Rizzardi and DelaereRizzardi 2011). This was to remain the principal working method of the Italian serialists throughout the 1950s. Maderna first used the technique in Improvvisazione per orchestra no. 1 (1951) and used it until his Piano Concerto (1959), including the very first work for mixed media, Musica su due dimensioni (1952) for flute and tape. Nono applied it from his Composizione per orchestra no. 1 (1951) until La terra e la compagna (1957), and Berio also composed works such as Nones (1954), the String Quartet (1956), and Alleluja (1956–8) with this technique (Reference NeidhöferNeidhöfer 2009). Other dimensions than pitch are derived from the squares as well: pitch and duration patterns in Maderna’s First Improvisation have different lengths, thus mimicking the color and talea of isorhythmic procedures from the ars nova. This leads Veniero Rizzardi to the following conclusion:

This ‘playful side’ would increase in importance in Maderna’s works from the 1960s and early 1970s, as testified by his delight in experimental and aleatoric techniques, gradual shift to more empirical methods, and fragmented textures that enable extensive reuse in satellite compositions, in addition to sometimes being just funny (Le Rire for tape, 1962). Berio, with whom Maderna had intensively worked at the electro-acoustic Studio di Fonologia in Milan between 1954 and 1960, similarly held on to some elements of serialism whilst abandoning its specific composition techniques. In his fourteen Sequenze for solo instruments (1958–2002), for instance, the incessant repetition and transformation of harmonic aggregates is not unlike the persistent use of row forms. Before founding the avant-garde free improvisation group ‘Nuova Consonanza’ in Rome in 1964, Franco Evangelisti had been living in Germany, attending the Darmstadt courses each year and working at the Cologne studio for electro-acoustic music. And yet Evangelisti adds other aspects to the serial music then in vogue in Germany and Italy. The ‘ordered forms’ of Ordini for sixteen instruments (1955) are, for instance, perceived as individual pitched sounds opposed to unpitched percussion in part 1 and silences opposed to refined sound complexes (including noise sounds produced by extended instrumental techniques) in part 2, leading Gianmario Borio to the conclusion that the ‘Nuova Consonanza’ is a continuation rather than an interruption of Evangelisti’s compositional activity (Borio 2013b).

In addition to Stockhausen, other composers were more or less involved in the serial movement in Germany. After he fled from Hungary in 1956, György Ligeti rapidly acquainted himself with Western European serialism as testified by his article on Boulez’s Structure Ia published in 1958 in Die Reihe. Ligeti’s own works from Atmosphères (1960) onwards are certainly inspired by his experiences in the Cologne electro-acoustic music studio and the research into sound conducted by composers of serial music, but it would stretch the concept of serialism too far to include his ‘Klangkompositionen’ in the serial canon. Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s serial works recently obtained the attention they deserve (Reference Korte, Michel, Henrich and AlbèraKorte 2012; Reference Rathert, Michel, Henrich and AlbèraRathert 2012). Dieter Schnebel edited the first three volumes of Stockhausen’s theoretical texts. His intimate knowledge of the techniques and aesthetics of serialism is already apparent in the concise early works from 1953–6 published in the Versuche anthology. But their multi-parametric layout serves other purposes than serial consistency. By differentiating timbre and, above all, separating the musicians in the performance space, Schnebel directs the listener’s attention to the quality of the individual sounds rather than to their structural coherence (Reference NauckNauck 1997: 131–54). It comes as no surprise that he considered John Cage a kindred spirit after the latter’s 1958 appearance in Darmstadt. Mauricio Kagel is another composer primarily known for his contributions to experimental music whose career was firmly footed in serialism, as in, for instance, Anagramma (1957–8) (see Reference HeileHeile 2006 and Reference HoltsträterHoltsträter 2010). The vocabulary of his works from the late 1950s and the 1960s is as refined and complex as that of the serialists, but he too pursued other aesthetic goals such as the blurring of concert and theatre performances. The anti-opera Staatstheater (1971) could not have been written without the systematic approach to dissolution of sound material and anti-hierarchical stance he was familiar with from serial music.

Gottfried Michael Koenig was less interested in broadening than in deepening serial practice. He worked as an assistant at the electro-acoustic music studio of the West German radio station in Cologne from 1954 to 1964, after which he directed the studio at the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht (1964–86). For Koenig, serialism was the starting point for composing music based on rational principles, and electronic sound production the best possible way to attain this ideal. Even his instrumental works are deeply affected by the working methods of the studio. To give but one example, the method of superimposing successively composed layers and a temporal layout based on measurements of clock time in the Zwei Klavierstücke (1959) clearly stem from the practice of tape composition (see Reference Quanten and DelaereQuanten 2011; Reference QuantenQuanten 2009). The row, whether as an ordered succession of sound elements or as equal distribution thereof, is approached by Koenig as an algorithm or simple mathematical formula on which all parameters and their combinations are based. Striving for utmost formal unity and using a serial programme to produce musical works in an automated way are Koenig’s personal contributions to the history of serial music in Western Europe. Starting with Projekt 1 (1964–6), serialism, electro-acoustic music production, and computer technology are in a direct line for him. Together with Lejaren Hiller and Iannis Xenakis, but working from a different perspective, Koenig is one of the founding fathers of computer-assisted composition. The contribution of serialism to this vital aspect of contemporary musical culture should not be underestimated.

Is the music historical gap between Lutyens and Brian Ferneyhough bridged by multiple serialism in the United Kingdom? The firm answer to that question is negative, although traces of it can be found in the amalgam of modernist techniques explored since the mid-1950s by the Manchester Group of composers: Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, and Harrison Birtwistle. In an environment in which Benjamin Britten or Ralph Vaughan Williams were considered contemporary music composers, a lot of the Continental European pre-war developments had yet to be discovered, discussed, and processed. With the Manchester Group, ‘signs of that most rare thing in British life, an artistic avant-garde’ began to emerge (Reference RupprechtRupprecht 2017: 110). The models for the artistic avant-garde represented by the Manchester Group included Schoenberg, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Ernst Krenek, and medieval music, rather than the young serialists they met during the Darmstadt New Music Courses between 1954 and 1957. Others fostered a more intense relationship with the Darmstadt composers. Richard Rodney Bennett studied with Boulez (1957–9) and Cornelius Cardew with Stockhausen, before becoming his assistant (1957–60). Soon afterwards, they moved away from the aesthetic concerns of the serial movement towards mainstream musical culture and an acute awareness of the political and social aspects of music making, respectively. The title of Cardew’s book of essays, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism (1974), shows the degree to which he had distanced himself from his former teacher.

Bill Hopkins was a British composer and critic whose relationship with European serialism was more focused and longer-lasting, in spite of his short life – he died at the age of thirty-seven – and a work list of eight (admittedly, extensive) composition projects only. He studied with Nono in Dartington (1960–1) and went to Paris to work with Barraqué (1965), whose Piano Sonata had impressed him very much. Hopkins published on Nono and Barraqué, translated and expanded Karl H. Wörner’s monograph on Stockhausen’s life and works, and authored the Boulez entry for the 1980 edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians that is still available in updated form in its online edition: the degree to which Hopkins was immersed in the European serial movement is evident. Nicolas Hodges has provided an introduction to Hopkins’s own compositions as well as having recorded Hopkins’s complete piano music (Reference HodgesHodges 1993). Describing the early piano work Sous-structures (1964), Hodges sums up the composer’s models, but also indicates the striking originality of Hopkins’s music: ‘While still bearing a relation to Boulez in particular, Sous-structures has more of Barraqué’s dramatic power, and more of Hopkins’s own rhythmic and gestural richness. Movement which on all levels is flexible and spasmodic is held together by a dramatic sense of great precision’ (Reference HodgesHodges 1993: 4–5). Listening to later works such as the violin solo piece Pendant (1968–9), it is indeed remarkable how compellingly the highly fragmented texture presents itself. Sensation (1965) for soprano, tenor saxophone, trumpet, viola, and harp seems to combine the sound worlds of Webern and Debussy, yet the credit for the conciliation of serial precision and great poetic force in this work and in his last completed composition, En attendant (1976–7), goes to Hopkins alone. One realises there is much more under the serial sun than, for instance, Le Marteau sans maître (1952–5). Along the same lines, Hopkins’s three masterful books for piano solo, Études en série (1965–72), broaden the serial spectrum beyond Boulez’s two books of Structures (1952–61), which have been a constant point of reference. Finally, the gestural richness invoked by Hodges above may well confirm that Hopkins can be historically thought of as at least a missing link between Lutyens and Ferneyhough, after all.

From the 1960s onwards, Danish composer Per Nørgård combined serial techniques with collage and improvisation. His ‘infinity series’ is based on the iteration and expansion of a single interval, yielding not only a rich field of diverse harmonic contexts but also a system of durational proportions. Within Scandinavia, however, it is Sweden that became primarily known for its contribution to serialism. Bengt Hambraeus introduced the use of pitch and duration rows in Swedish music but, during a relatively short period (principally 1956–62), Bo Nilsson had a greater impact on mainstream serialism. In his piano solo Quantitäten (1958), the performer is faced with a complex notational system in which pitch, octave registers, and durations are to be derived from each other, based on two logarithmical scales. Another ‘quantity’ to be realised by the pianist is a dynamic range consisting of eighteen values numbered in the score from 1.0 (the softest, barely audible sound) to 10.5 (the maximum volume) (Reference AertsAerts 2000). This dynamic scale and its notation are also used in the Mädchentotenlieder for soprano and chamber orchestra from the same year. Zwanzig Gruppen, also from 1958, refers not so much to Stockhausen’s work for three orchestral groups as to his Klavierstück XI (1956). The score shows twenty groups distributed over the double page, but the expansion pertains more to the participation of three musicians than to the additional group (compared to the nineteen groups of Klavierstück XI). Each musician has her own score with twenty groups to be played as fast as possible, but the density varies between 140 (clarinet), 160 (oboe), and 180 (piccolo flute) crotchets in total (Figure 12.3). Performers decide the succession of groups, but no group can be repeated before the other nineteen have been played. A performance can consist of one (roughly three minutes) to twenty (roughly one hour) group complexes presenting the total number of twenty groups. Nilsson’s composition is a prime example of what Stockhausen described as ‘vieldeutige Form’, an open form type in which the composer fixes the details but not the overall form (Stockhausen 1963b). Since it is a chamber music piece for three players, it may well be the first instance of ‘plural form’ in which the synchronicity is unpredictable as well, though a comparison might be made with John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–8). Above all, Zwanzig Gruppen is an exciting virtuosic work full of energy.

Figure 12.3 Bo Nilsson, Zwanzig Gruppen, excerpt from the piccolo part

Conclusions

This chapter contains a limited number of examples, but even then it is clear that given the huge diversity of serial practices, all attempts to pin down what constitutes the essence of post-war Western European serial music are doomed to fail. Surely, a desire to include sound aspects other than pitch into the structural framework can be generally observed. Some composers aimed at deriving all parameters from a common principle (for example, Maderna’s magic squares, Van San’s isomorphy, or Koenig’s algorithms). Most composers selected a number of steps between a minimum and maximum value for each parameter; initially, this number was twelve (betraying the historical origin of multiple serialism in dodecaphony), but smaller and larger numbers would soon be used as well. From the very beginning, serial order – the fixed succession of elements as defined by the row – was abandoned in favour of the equal distribution of the elements: an equally effective procedure to avoid the emphatic hierarchy expressed in tonal music. Other parameters than pitch, duration, articulation, and loudness were soon integrated in the serial practice. Timbre was initially considered difficult to manage, until sound spectra could be composed through synthesis of sine tones in the electro-acoustic music studio. However, limiting the serial project to ‘pure sounds’ has been but one of the many aesthetic choices. More inclusive approaches would soon emerge, Pousseur’s serial use of harmonic systems from the past arguably being the most extreme example. Another noticeable development in Western European serial music is the gradual absorption of chance elements. Finally, much attention goes to the perception of musical form, in particular to the construction of compelling large-scale forms out of unstable and fragmented musical material, as in the cases of Barraqué or Hopkins.

Although the composers benefiting from an individual chapter in this volume undoubtedly were the driving forces, serial music in Western European cannot possibly be limited to Boulez, Nono, or Stockhausen. This chapter has aimed at broadening the perspective not merely by introducing further protagonists who wrote aesthetically appealing works, but more importantly, other interpretations of what constitutes serialism. In light of this, narrowing serial music to Boulez’s Structure Ia is – to put it mildly – an oversimplification. And yet Reference LigetiLigeti’s 1958 article all too often serves, even today, as a convenient didactic tool to give students a basic introduction to serialism. However, Ligeti cannot be held responsible for equating Boulez’s music or indeed serialism as a whole with this early uncharacteristic composition.

Whereas cultural institutions and politics might have construed the avant-garde and serial music as a weapon against the Soviet Union in the context of the Cold War, there is no historical evidence that the serial composers themselves aimed at criticising the lack of (artistic) freedom in Eastern Europe with their work (though see Reference Borio and HoecknerBorio 2006, 45–46). They were struggling with the past rather than with the present, trying to come to terms with Nazism by rejecting all aspects that had led to this devastating ideology. Hence the eagerness to oppose the pre-war musical developments tooth and nail and the desire to start from scratch. And yet their relationship with the past was ambiguous, shaking off musical Romanticism (and expressionism as a continuation thereof) because of its excessive celebration of the self, but at the same time embracing and productively misunderstanding Ockeghem, Monteverdi, Mozart, Debussy, or Webern as historical legitimisation for their own radical proposal. They might have aimed to reset the clock from the catastrophic five to twelve to the zero hour, but they did not forget how time had passed before that.

Arnold Whittall’s assessment of serialism’s many-sidedness offers the best possible final word for this chapter:

Whittall is speaking about twelve-tone music, but it fits multiple serialism like a glove as well. Despite the fact that serialism in post-war Western Europe had a common drive, the actual products of this movement could not be more different from one another, as this chapter has argued. The joys of serial music are wide ranging, for those who care to listen.

No one ever imagined serialism would thrive in Canada and the United States. Before the Second World War, the majority of American and Canadian composers saw it as a distinctly Austro-German phenomenon – the epitome of the dominant cultural force that they were trying to ‘get out from under’, as Aaron Copland famously said (Reference Cone, Boretz and ConeCone 1971a: 141). A small handful of composers experimented with it, after exposure to the music of the Second Viennese School and interactions with its members’ students. Yet serialism was at first a European trend of marginal influence in the United States and Canada. It was thus surprising to many when it rose to significant prominence after the Second World War, flowering over subsequent decades to produce artistic innovations of remarkable variety.

From the beginning, serialism developed rather differently in Canada and the United States than it did in Europe. In these two countries, ‘serial’ has denoted an array of approaches, all involving a fixed series of pitches or other musical elements, which may or may not show a debt to Schoenberg’s methods. Indeed, American and Canadian serialism has been significantly shaped by the different institutional, ideological, and cultural contexts in which composers lived and worked on the North American continent. In the first half of the twentieth century, Canadian and American composers were still working to break out of national and global obscurity. Keen as ever to keep up with European developments, their early (and limited) experiments with Schoenberg’s method of composing with twelve tones were highly idiosyncratic, shaped by the values of American individualism, the heightened commitment to creating a national music, and the idea of a uniquely American trajectory of modernism, centring around a movement known as ultramodernism. During the Second World War, with the arrival of celebrated serialist émigrés including Arnold Schoenberg and Ernst Krenek, the United States especially became an important safe haven (along with the United Kingdom) for a rejected and persecuted Austro-German serial tradition. After the war, as European countries began rebuilding their devastated infrastructures, economies, and arts communities, the United States and Canada enjoyed comparative stability and wealth. European composers may have believed their music – like their architecture, infrastructure, and social structures – needed to be rebuilt from scratch at ‘zero hour’; American and Canadian composers did not face anything like the same existential, economic, or ideological challenge. Rather, many were able to thrive in well-funded university music departments that were often welcoming to serial innovations. Yet this is not to say the American and Canadian music scenes were unaffected by ideology or politics. In the early 1950s, the burgeoning Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union began to create a distinct and challenging environment for composers, especially in the United States, where anti-Communism was particularly prevalent. This chapter tells the story of serialism in the United States and Canada against the background of these artistic, institutional, and ideological developments.

Serialism and Ultramodernism

The story of ultramodernism is an important chapter in the history of serialism in the United States and Canada, because of its influence on later serial composers. Yet it is important to note up front that its leading proponents saw their methods as distinct from serialism, which they associated (negatively) with the Old World and the past. The remarkable range of techniques and approaches utilised by composers such as Dane Rudhyar, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, and Ruth Crawford during the 1920s and 1930s is radically – and deliberately – different from the contemporaneous work of the Second Viennese School, infused with distinctively spiritual and Americanist commitments.

It is only really possible to consider the ultramoderns as contributors to the history of serialism if we step away from a narrative history of serialism that defines its origins in Schoenbergian terms. Like the Second Viennese School, the ultramoderns were interested in finding new ways to organise dissonant material. But the approaches they developed, although also employing series, often functioned differently from the twelve-tone method. One significant outcome of their experiments, for example, was ‘dissonant counterpoint’, a method that ensured non-repetition of pitches and avoided consonant triads. Crawford in particular can be understood as a significant serial innovator for her creation of precompositional schemes involving the application of systematic procedures of rotation and transposition to series of pitches (Reference StrausStraus 2009: 16).

Just as the ultramoderns’ methods were different from the Europeans, so too was their aesthetic. Well aware that comparisons of American music to that from Europe were typically unfavourable, they tended to emphasise the differences between their approaches and those of Schoenberg and his colleagues, rather than the similarities (Reference OjaOja 2000: 115). Cowell acknowledged that Ruggles’s music had ‘certain technical similarities’ with Schoenberg’s, for example, but said that while Schoenberg’s music evoked ‘a sophistication and a feeling of approaching decay’, Ruggles’s represented an ‘exuberant upspringing’ (Henry Cowell quoted in Reference OjaOja 2000: 114). With such language, Cowell alludes to the markedly different social contexts in which the two groups were working. Ruggles and Rudhyar, meanwhile, felt that although Schoenberg looked ‘well on paper’, sonically his music was ‘dry … uninspired … unsustained’ (letter from Ruggles to Rudhyar, quoted in Reference OjaOja 2000: 114). The American ultramoderns’ approach to systematising atonal writing certainly marks its own fascinating contribution to the history of serialism, if we understand the term in the broadest sense.

Not all early twentieth-century composers reacted negatively to Schoenberg, however, and his music did become influential for a small group of American composers between the wars. These musicians became aware of Schoenberg during concerts early in the century. In the 1910s, some leading US symphony orchestras performed his works, although usually to negative or indifferent reactions (Reference FeisstFeisst 2011: 17–22). During the First World War, these negative responses strengthened as anti-German sentiment grew, because Schoenberg was so strongly associated with the development of German music, despite being Austrian. His music was, as a result, rarely heard in cities like New York during the war. This would change after the war’s end, when interest picked up once again (Reference OjaOja 2000: 49–50; Reference FeisstFeisst 2011: 22–3).

Most histories cast Adolph Weiss as the first American composer to employ the twelve-tone method, following his return from studying with Schoenberg in Berlin and Vienna between 1925 and 1927. Joseph Straus has noted that Weiss’s writings seem to demonstrate significant misunderstandings about Schoenberg’s methods, suggesting Schoenberg may not have spent much of his teaching time discussing his own music (cf. Reference HicksHicks 1990, 127). Nevertheless, Straus demonstrates, Weiss’s own music does suggest he had grasped the central tenets of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method: Weiss’s works use twelve-tone rows, combinatoriality, and symmetry, but his approach does not shy away from pitch repetition (Reference StrausStraus 2009: 3–7). Milton Babbitt, one of the leading post-war serialists, would claim in 1955 that Weiss’s compositions and Wallingford Riegger’s Dichotomy (1932–3) were the only truly serial American works written before Schoenberg arrived in the United States in 1933 (Reference BabbittBabbitt 1955: 54). Riegger’s work may well have been influenced by discussions with Weiss, with whom he worked at the Pan-American Association of Composers.

European Serialists in Exile

The Nazis’ increasingly severe persecution of Jews and leftists, and their denotation of serial music as ‘degenerate [entartete] music’, brought a number of prominent European serialists to the United States as exiles. Canada did not receive the most famous serialists, although numerous Jewish musicians, music teachers, and professors migrated there from Europe before and during the war years. Schoenberg left Austria early in the Nazi period, arriving in the United States in 1933. Other leading serialists – Ernst Krenek, Stefan Wolpe, and Hanns Eisler – arrived in 1938. Each of these composers would take up a teaching post at an American higher education institution, where they shared their knowledge with a new generation of American composers. Krenek was particularly influential through his writings and lectures on contemporary compositional methods. All were profoundly altered, psychologically, by the experience of exile and migration, as well as by the Holocaust: their music often reflects this. Wolpe turned in the United States to working with ‘pitch constellation’, with his twelve-tone structures typically lying beneath the surface of his works. Krenek developed a new approach that fused twelve-tone and modal elements. Eisler wrote his Deutscher Sinfonie (1935–9) as an anti-fascist statement in his own tonally infused serial language, while Schoenberg channelled his emotional response to the Shoah into A Survivor from Warsaw (1947). Schoenberg’s style changed significantly in the United States, becoming more tonally influenced and more classical. These rather flexible approaches to serialism would help create a distinctly American take on serialism, for both US-born and immigrant composers.

Yet the influence of these European exiles upon American serialism was not always direct. Although many of Schoenberg’s American students were successful, none became a leading serialist (Reference FeisstFeisst 2011: 12). During the 1930s, immediately after Schoenberg’s arrival, composers in the United States or Canada who were studying and experimenting with the twelve-tone method were usually doing so in isolation. George Perle, for example, wrote a string quartet in 1938 based on private research into the method, although he would soon discover from Krenek that he had misunderstood some crucial aspects. Krenek praised the result, however, which helped shape the innovative alternative approach that Perle would later call twelve-tone tonality (Reference StrausStraus 2009: 56). In Canada, meanwhile, John Weinzweig wrote the first Canadian twelve-tone works in the late 1930s, after making a solo study of Schoenberg’s music and the writings of his students while studying at the Eastman School of Music. He did this despite his professors’ disdain for the method, one of whom, Weinzweig said, referred to Schoenberg as ‘a perverted Jew’, a troubling but certainly far from unique reflection of American antisemitism and its effect on Schoenberg’s reception (Reference KeillorKeillor 1994: 19). Weinzweig remained committed to the method on his return to Canada from the United States. As other Canadians began turning to serialism, he was increasingly held up as one of Canada’s most important serialists, respected for his writings on the topic and his teachings as a professor at the University of Toronto (Reference Nolan, Beckwith and CherneyNolan 2011).

Although the émigrés were not directly connected to these early North American serial composers, they were nevertheless influential, because they emboldened those interested in the avant-garde (Reference StrausStraus 2009: 27–8). Come the 1940s, a growing number of influential American- and Canadian-born composers were either utilising serialism or showing the influence of its techniques in their music, including Walter Piston (who wrote his first twelve-tone work, the Chromatic Study on the Name of Bach, in 1940), Milton Babbitt (whose first serial work was Three Compositions for Piano in 1947), and Elliott Carter. Babbitt has claimed that the presence of Schoenberg and his émigré colleagues on American soil actually helped American composers get over some of their anxiety of (European) influence. ‘It was not merely that we could learn from the Schoenbergs and the Hindemiths and the Bartóks’, he said. ‘It was that suddenly we were no longer in any sense irreverently awed by them. We suddenly realised they had their failings’ (Reference Gagne and CarasGagne and Caras 1982: 46). At the same time, American composers interested in serialism began to realise that they saw its possibilities quite differently than the new European arrivals. Although he and his colleagues were thrilled to meet and talk with European serialists, Babbitt wrote, the Europeans’ use of ‘phrases such as “historical necessity”, even “inevitability”, as justificatory were, for us, unfortunate, undesirable, and – beyond all else – unnecessary’. Babbitt has claimed that when he suggested there were potentialities to Schoenberg’s methods that went beyond Schoenberg’s own explorations, he was quickly ‘banished from the company of true believers’ (Reference Babbitt, Brinkmann and WolffBabbitt 1999: 41). The émigrés were a welcome addition to the American music scene for most composers. But American iconoclasts like Babbitt were not in awe of them. They already knew that serialism in the United States would go its own way.

A Post-War Flourishing

As interest in serial methods grew significantly amongst composers of both acoustic and electronic music at the beginning of the 1950s, it precipitated a reappraisal of early twentieth-century American ultramodernism. Elliott Carter, writing in the early 1960s, claimed that he and his colleagues found themselves looking anew at composers like Charles Ives, Cowell, and Ruggles, who had participated in the North American ‘emancipation of the dissonance’, but whose music had, he said, ‘previously been considered meaningless’ (Reference Carter, Boretz and ConeCarter 1971: 217).

Two different approaches to serialism now arose at once. As Copland wrote in his autobiography, looking back at the late 1950s, ‘It seemed to me at the time that the twelve-tone method was pointing in two opposite directions: toward the extreme of total organisation with electronic applications, and toward a gradual absorption into what had become a very freely interpreted tonalism’ (Reference Copland and PerlisCopland and Perlis 1989: 242). Babbitt was the leading proponent of the former attitude, leading the charge to systematise serial applications and serialising musical elements other than pitch. The technological capabilities of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center’s cutting-edge Mark II synthesizer significantly enhanced his experiments. The result was a serial output that differed significantly from that of Schoenberg or Webern. Babbitt’s music is highly original, utilising arrays of combinatorial sets, scattered across registers, which mutate over long periods. Babbitt also played a significant role in formalising the vocabulary used to analyse serial music through his many talks and writings. He was the figurehead for a group of highly rigorous younger American serialists who had been educated in the technique as students, which included Charles Wuorinen, Donald Martino, Ralph Shapey, Ursula Mamlok, and Peter Westergaard, evidencing a change in university curricula that indexes the change in serialism’s fortunes in the United States (Reference StrausStraus 2009: 124–56). Each created their own idiosyncratic method of working with series in their music. Canada also housed highly systematic serialists, such as Serge Garant in Quebec. Garant’s music, however, responded primarily to European strategies, specifically those of Pierre Boulez. He is just one example of the significant influence of Boulez in Francophone Canada especially.

Although histories of twentieth-century music tend to focus on composers who took serial methods to their limits, like Babbitt, American and Canadian composers were actually far more likely to treat serialism as just one possible device in their compositional toolkit, as part of the ‘freely interpreted tonalism’ that Copland described. Post-war music with serial elements written in these countries demonstrates a wide array of highly flexible approaches, revealing an ‘extreme diversity’, as Babbitt himself wrote (Reference BabbittBabbitt 1955: 53). Multiple serialism particularly was of much less interest to American composers than their European colleagues: on the contrary, many who used serial methods retained a sense of a home key in their works. Roger Sessions, for example, described the twelve-tone technique as ‘essentially practical’, taking no issue with listeners who heard ‘tonal centres’ in his music and objecting to the ‘absolute distinction some people make between tonal music and nontonal music’ (quoted in Reference Imbrie, Boretz and ConeImbrie 1971: 63; Reference Cone, Boretz and ConeCone 1971b: 102).

Of all the composers living in the United States and Canada who embraced this more flexible approach to serialism, Igor Stravinsky was probably the most significant and influential. Like Schoenberg, Stravinsky was an émigré, having come to the United States in 1939 from revolutionary Russia by way of Switzerland and France. Given he had long cast himself in opposition to Schoenberg and the serial method, few anticipated Stravinsky’s sudden swerve in 1952, when he was in his late sixties. His turn to serialism seems to have been the result of a combination of related factors: a growing interest in the music of Schoenberg and Webern and the creative possibilities of their methods; Schoenberg’s death in 1951; the influence of Robert Craft; and also, some speculate, fear of losing status amongst younger composers (Reference WalshWalsh 1988: 217–23; Reference Straus and CrossStraus 2003: 149–52; Reference CraftCraft 1992: 33–48). Like many of his colleagues working in the United States and Canada, Stravinsky’s serial language is highly individualistic. Although a series of pitches served as his starting point (frequently significantly fewer than twelve), he often repeated pitches and created themes with his aggregates. In contrast to Schoenberg’s Expressionist serialism, Stravinsky’s approach showed the influence of Webern and also connects to Stravinsky’s own previous neoclassical style, employing clean, sparse textures and symmetrical designs and using small motivic cells to generate larger structures. Stravinsky employed serial strategies for the remainder of his life. Each resulting work is highly individual – and highly original – in both its approach to serialism and the sound world it creates, as a comparison of Agon (1953–7) with Threni (1957–8), for example, immediately makes plain.

Another well-established and highly respected composer of tonal music in the United States, Copland, also took up serialism after the Second World War, provoking similar levels of astonishment from composers, critics, and audiences alike. Like Stravinsky, Copland turned to the method early in the 1950s, starting with the Piano Quartet (1950). As Copland explained in a 1968 interview, ‘the younger fellows, Boulez and such’ had shown him it was possible to ‘keep the method while throwing away the esthetic’, which he found excessively Romantic – too ‘weltschmerzy’ – and even ‘too German’. ‘German music’, Copland said, ‘was the thing we were trying to get out from under’; he had felt in earlier decades, he said, that for Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, ‘the expressive quality of their music took precedence over their method’. Now freed of its Central European philosophical baggage by Boulez’s music, he said, serialism ‘freshened up one’s technique and one’s approach’, offering ‘a new way of moving tones about’. Interestingly, however, in the same interview he described his approach to serialism as ‘very much in the Schoenberg line’ and made plain that he was ‘very vague’ in his knowledge of ‘current methods’ (Reference ConeCone 1968: 67–8). He was also quick to demonstrate a long-standing interest in serial methods, despite his reputation as a tonalist, pointing out that he had used series in music before, most notably in the Piano Variations of 1930 (which, he said, used a seven-note row) (Reference ConeCone 1968: 66). Nevertheless, and despite this history, Copland’s shift to serialism as a well-established, fifty-year-old, accessible Americanist, alongside Stravinsky’s, seemed to indicate that a sea change was underway in the American music scene.

Although Copland’s Schoenbergian serial works seem to have been of only marginal interest to younger composers, they found Stravinsky’s applications of the method to be of much greater significance. American serialists like Babbitt and Wuorinen paid attention, publishing analyses of them in leading journals. Soon, numerous American and Canadian composers were developing a serial style that had much in common with that of Stravinsky, including Arthur Berger, Irving Fine, Louise Talma, and John Beckwith (Reference StrausStraus 2009: 39–40). Some of these composers had been writing serial music before Stravinsky’s change of course; they claimed their influences actually came from other places. Whatever the chain of influence, they share with Stravinsky a similar tonally inflected writing and approach to texture, rhythm, and mood (Reference StrausStraus 2009: 93–102). Talma, who used symmetrical serial rows within a ‘perfect-fifth oriented diatonic sound world’, said that the approach of Fine and Stravinsky ‘made … musical sense’ in a way that ‘strict serial writing did not’ (Talma, quoted in Reference StrausStraus 2009: 102).

Canadian composers’ interest in taking a more flexible approach to serial methods began right after the Second World War. Barbara Pentland’s first serial work was the Octet for Winds (1948): it came about following conversations with Weinzweig and Dika Newlin (a Schoenberg student and scholar). Like Copland, with whom she had studied at Tanglewood, Pentland believed that an ‘intuitive’ approach to serialism offered a way ‘to escape the nineteenth century’, where everything was ‘overstuffed and heavy’ (Reference StrausStraus 2009: 86). After a 1955 visit to the Darmstadt New Music Courses, her music was increasingly influenced by that of Webern, although she continued to treat her rows with significant freedom, developing her own distinctive methods. In later decades, Pentland took the unusual step of combining serialism with aleatoric procedures, creating opportunities for improvisation on twelve-tone materials.

Numerous American composers adopted a similarly instinctive approach to serialism, ignoring the supposed ‘rules’, rejecting the strict approaches associated (rightly or wrongly) with Babbitt and Boulez, and exploring serial methods as one technique among many. Ben Weber, for example, thought of serial techniques as simply offering ‘an available form’, providing a precompositional starting point, after which he would ‘make up his own rules’ (Weber, quoted in Reference StrausStraus 2009: 72). Ross Lee Finney, meanwhile, used the twelve-tone method to enhance the ‘expressive potential’ of his predominantly tonal compositions (Susan Hayes Hitchens, quoted in Reference StrausStraus 2009: 80). Finney was a student of Sessions, who also embraced the method primarily as a means to create coherence, without avoiding tonal implications (Reference PollackPollack 1992: 432). Charles Wuorinen is another composer in this group, utilising serial organisation but retaining pitch centricity. For Donald Martino, too, the twelve-tone system was ‘a universe of interconnected tone roads’, helping create a path through a chromatic universe and serving to create formal unity, but without privileging a single row, as Schoenberg did (James Boros, quoted in Reference StrausStraus 2009: 129). The first Canadian serialist, Weinzweig, embraced a more flexible employment of tone rows during the 1960s and 1970s, utilising tonal centres and triadic harmonies, employing row-independent pitch material, and making ‘the divergence of serial and non-serial techniques itself into a structural element’, as music theorist Catherine Nolan has written (Reference Nolan, Beckwith and CherneyNolan 2011: 147).

Weinzweig was one amongst a small group of Canadian and American composers who combined serial writing with jazz influences in their music. Gunther Schuller was the composer best known for this distinctly North American stylistic fusion. He dubbed it ‘Third Stream’, an approach that, he said, ‘must be born out of a respect for and full dedication to both the musics it attempts to fuse’ (Reference SchullerSchuller 1986: 116). Hale Smith, an African American composer trained in both classical and jazz traditions, employed jazz more subtly in his twelve-tone compositions, using it, for example, to shape his approach to phrasing (Reference StrausStraus 2009: 114).

Contexts for Serialism’s Post-War Prestige

What brought a European compositional approach that most pre-war American and Canadian composers had ignored to a place of significant prestige in the 1950s? Certainly the wartime arrival of prominent European serialists had been significant. But two other factors represent important contexts for the increasing interest in serial methods at this time. The first was the changing university music scene, and the second, the cultural politics of the Cold War.

Never before had American and Canadian university music schools and departments offered such a welcoming home for composers. Although many significant serialists in these countries operated outside of the university, the growth of composition programmes certainly helped in bolstering (and sometimes also challenging) the prestige of serialism, both in the United States and Canada. Where before the Second World War only a very few composers saw a university degree as essential to their training, with the rush of veterans to enrol in degree programs at the end of the war, more and more young composers sought out a university education. A proportion of those in this group went on to join leading émigrés and established American-born composers in seeking professorial positions to sustain their compositional careers, helping launch and grow composition programmes, including graduate degrees, in universities across the continent. With the scientific method increasingly revered in the academy and across society at large, music schools seeking to offer higher degrees in composition emphasised the ‘research’ and ‘experiment’ involved in the composer’s craft to justify their value. In some locales, this meant an emphasis on methods of musical composition deemed more ‘scientific’, which included serial approaches. Princeton’s composition professors, for example, when advertising their composition programme in the early 1960s, described composition as ‘a difficult and demanding intellectual activity’, which ‘demands thought as rigorous, informed, and precise as does mathematics’ (Babbitt, Cone, and Arthur Mendel, quoted in Reference GirardGirard 2007: 213). One of their most celebrated faculty members, Milton Babbitt, famously depicted the composer as a ‘specialist’, whose experiments, like those of a physicist, need not be understood by the general public to be of value to society (Reference BabbittBabbitt 1958). Perspectives like these were certainly not held by all university composers, however, or even by all serialists. Krenek complained that ‘in some circles the attachment to science has become a sort of status symbol’ (Reference Krenek, Boretz and ConeKrenek 1971: 129). Such developments also precipitated the growth of music theory as a distinct research discipline, built principally on a fast-growing body of scholarly approaches to analysing twelve-tone music and on Heinrich Schenker’s theories of tonal harmony (Reference GirardGirard 2007).

With a number of serialists now in university posts, a few prestigious university and conservatory music programmes became major centres for serial composition. Perhaps surprisingly, given the relatively conservative history of its music program until that point, Harvard quickly became a front-runner in this regard. In the late 1940s, this university was seen as the top destination for American composition students, primarily thanks to faculty member Walter Piston, who had been using the twelve-tone technique since the early 1940s. Many of his students, including Carter and Harold Shapero, followed suit, fusing Schoenbergian methods with neoclassicism. In the mid-fifties, however, the centre of serial activity shifted to Princeton and later Juilliard, where students (and future leading composers) like Finney, Leon Kirchner, Donald Martino, David Del Tredici, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich studied serialism with Sessions and Babbitt (Reference PollackPollack 1992: 426). Another influential twelve-tone community blossomed under Weinzweig at the University of Toronto. Importantly, however, not all universities embraced serialism. Indeed, some worked actively to keep it out of their curriculum. At the Eastman School of Music, faculty opposition to Schoenberg’s method was well known, as described above (p. 229). Director Howard Hanson sought to ensure a focus on tonal Americanist music, often voicing his opposition to serialism (Reference AnsariAnsari 2018: 30–1).

The Cold War was another major factor in the growing prestige of serialism after the Second World War, especially in the United States. The stand-off between the USSR and the United States had the strange effect of implicitly associating music-stylistic choices with ideological positions. With accessible tonal music problematically associated with the propaganda efforts of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and amidst growing anxiety that Communism might be infiltrating American society, the previously widespread commitment to accessible compositions that evoked a distinctly national experience was suddenly called in question. As an anti-Communist fervour gripped the United States in the early 1950s, peaking with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigations of Communist influence, politically left-wing composers in particular seemed to experience growing anxiety about writing accessible nationalist music. This style now risked association with the Soviets’ required artistic approach – socialist realism – and thus with Communist politics. In this context, some understood serialism as a representation of Western freedom, democracy, logical empiricism, and science, in opposition to tonal approaches increasingly problematised as the musical language of oppressive regimes (Reference AnsariAnsari 2018). As Krenek put it, for example, the choice to adopt serialism – a style that the totalitarian ‘tyrants’ hated – was for him a way to protest and resist their influence (Reference Krenek, Boretz and ConeKrenek 1971: 127).

Against this background, and especially in the late fifties and early sixties, some leading composers began to characterise tonality and atonality as binary opposites. More than simply alternative approaches to harmony and pitch, atonality and serialism were now cast by some as two distinct stylistic positions between which one had to choose. This happened even as numerous composers were combining tonal and serial elements in their music and in spite of Schoenberg’s own claims that they were far from incompatible (cf. Reference Schoenberg and SteinSchoenberg 1975b: 263). Composers considering themselves on the ‘tonal’ side of the dyad were particularly apt to describe the situation as polarised. Leonard Bernstein, for example, spoke in 1957 of a ‘great split’ that had divided the musical world into ‘two camps: the atonalists, who believe tonality to be a dead duck, as against all others, who are struggling to preserve tonality at all costs’. He expanded his military metaphor further in describing Stravinsky’s decision to embrace serialism, saying it felt ‘like the defection of a general to the enemy camp, taking all his faithful regiments with him’ (Reference BernsteinBernstein 1967: 201–2). Concerns about an artificial and polemic-inducing separation between tonal and serial composers were not limited to tonal composers, however. Finney, for example, who combined tonal and serial elements in his compositions using a system he called ‘complementarity’, spoke of an ‘untenable … division’ that had been constructed between serial and tonal composers in the 1950s by music critics and other non-composers who overemphasised the opposition. As a result, he said, ‘a battle raged’ between the two sides (Finney, quoted in Reference StrausStraus 2009: 80).

A growing divide between ‘avant-garde’ and ‘conservative’ composers played out in Canada, too. University composition students had to manage the difficulties that came with being placed into one ‘camp’ or the other, depending on the composer they were studying with (Reference KeillorKeillor 2006: 219). There is no evidence (at least, none yet) that Canadian composers linked musical choices with ideological ones. Rather, it seems that Canadians experienced the Cold War a little differently. Take, for example, their composition of serial works on national subjects, such as Harry Somers’s North Country (1948), a serial work about Canadian landscapes, and John Beckwith’s The Trumpets of Summer (1964), which uses serial techniques to set a text by Margaret Atwood about Shakespeare’s important place in Canada. In the United States at this time, by contrast, nationalist serialism seemed to be an oxymoron for most, with Americanists who had turned to serialism typically producing serial works that had non-programmatic titles and abstract content. Canadian composers were frequently startled by the vitriolic divisions between tonal and serial composers that they witnessed in both Europe and the United States. Harry Somers, for example, was surprised to discover that Darius Milhaud forbade serialism when he went to study with him in 1949 (Reference KeillorKeillor 2006: 220). Glenn Gould wrote with bemusement and sarcasm in 1955 about having recently discovered that Boulez had turned against Schoenberg, a development that created a ‘cultural quake’ which had, he said, only just reached Toronto, but which apparently required ‘each of us to declare his allegiance or take his stand against the new order’ (Reference GouldGould 1956: 20).

While Canadian composers watched the Cold War culture wars from a concerned outsider perspective, for some American composers such developments were not merely surprising and damaging, they also precipitated profound anxiety. Virgil Thomson wrote in 1961 that it felt radical for him to resist serialism and other experimental approaches and to continue writing relatively accessible music ‘in a time of fear and conformities, of cold wars and urgent concealments’, when most composers were hiding ‘behind a thick wall of complexity’ (Reference Thomson and KostelanetzThomson 2002: 164–5). At around the same time, Roy Harris described the popularity of serialism as the artistic reflection of a climate of fear (Reference AnsariAnsari 2018: 115). For Harris, serialism was an excessively restrictive approach, incompatible with democratic values. Harris and Bernstein would both experience compositional crises in the 1960s, as they tried to reconcile their profound investment in musical Americanism and their love for tonality with a compositional climate which they believed saw both as politically problematic (Reference AnsariAnsari 2018: 93–127 and 162–99).

Intertwined with the anti-Communist anxiety made manifest with McCarthy’s suddenly increased power and influence was the ‘Lavender Scare’. This was another reactionary Washington-led effort, which further marginalised already-endangered and marginalised homosexuals in American government and society by marking them as politically dangerous. Nadine Hubbs has argued that the rise of serialism in the United States was, at least in part, a response to the view among some composers that the success and dominance of musical Americanism in the first half of the century – a movement with several gay leading figures – was a kind of homosexual conspiracy. In this context, serialism (perceived as ultra-masculine and ultra-scientific) would ‘masculinise’ American music for the new Cold War context, minimising the problematic ‘femininity’ of the homosexual-dominated Americanist circle (Reference HubbsHubbs 2004: 158–69).

For leading Americanist Aaron Copland – a leftist, a homosexual, and also a Jew – such anxieties may well have played a role in his decision to turn to serialism. There is, however, also plentiful evidence that Copland was very attracted to serialism as an artistic tool, once he had appreciated it was possible to utilise the method without embracing the Romantic, Austro-Germanic aesthetic (see Reference Cone, Boretz and ConeCone 1971a, 141). Furthermore, Copland’s pre-war oeuvre had also revealed his interest in serial organisation.

Indeed, Copland’s case serves as a cautionary tale for those seeking to contextualise the high status of serialism in the United States during the Cold War. The fact that Cold War-exacerbated anxieties around Communism and homosexuality seem to have played a role in bolstering the appeal of serialism for American composers after the war certainly does not mean that the method was only a political move for those who chose to utilise it. A composer like Copland was undoubtedly a victim of Cold War anxieties and may have deliberately (or subconsciously) turned to a compositional approach that drew less attention to his politically problematic characteristics. That does not mean, however, that he was not also attracted to twelve-tone methods for purely artistic reasons.

The 1970s brought a remarkably strong backlash against the prestige of serialism during the previous two decades, as tonally oriented, postmodern approaches came into fashion. Both tonal composers and formerly serial composers began to use strong language to describe the dominance of serialism during the previous decades. Their metaphors were violent, ideological, and political: they spoke of ‘serial killings’, of ‘totalitarian modernism’, and of ‘a kind of Nazism in music’, in which tonality was ‘verboten’ (Reference Rorem and McClatchyRorem 2001: 115–16; David Del Tredici, quoted in Reference PagePage 1983: SM22; Reference CairnsCairns 2010). Some asserted that the domestic and international effects of the Cold War were to blame for this situation. Elie Siegmeister, retrospectively examining the ‘death’ of musical Americanism, blamed it on ‘the savage trauma of mass destruction, the deep anxieties produced by the bomb, the disillusionment with human ideals arising from the Cold War, and the vicious persecutions of the McCarthy period’ (Reference SiegmeisterSiegmeister 1977).

These ex post facto assertions that serialism’s dominance in the American music scene of the 1950s and 1960s had political causes have appeared highly dubious to some scholars. Joseph Straus, for example, has questioned claims made during the 1970s of a ‘serial tyranny’ in the 1950s and 1960s, arguing that tonal composers experienced nothing more than ‘the soft tyranny of fashionability’ (Reference StrausStraus 2009: 202). I believe, however, that it is problematic to dismiss composers’ claims of social and political pressure to write serial music as no more than sour grapes – especially given the existence of sources from the 1950s and 1960s that describe feelings of polarisation, an obligation to choose, and a resulting anxiety. But this is not a story of good guys and bad guys. It is possible to acknowledge that some composers felt pressure to turn to serialism without parroting their divisive metaphors – or blaming serial composers for this development. It is also necessary continually to re-emphasise that serialism and tonality were never, in fact, incompatible opposites, nor, for American serialists at least, were they treated musically or philosophically as such. Piston, for example, reminded one interviewer that tonality never ‘collapsed’, despite the proclamations of many younger composers (Reference Westergaard, Boretz and ConeWestergaard 1971: 166). And yet the binarisation of tonality and serialism is evident in many Cold War composers’ rhetoric. It seems highly likely, in this context, that the extreme social conformism and political polarisation of the 1950s fed an ‘us/them’ mentality for some in the compositional world, which endured into the 1960s. In some cases, this tension between approaches produced compelling musical explorations of both tonal and serial methods simultaneously; for some, it meant ‘picking a side’; and for others, it brought internal conflict and significant aesthetic challenges.

The 1970s and Beyond

The fact that serialism’s prestige in the United States and Canada was eclipsed by neo-tonal, experimental, and postmodern approaches in the 1970s and beyond does not mean that the history of serialism in these countries ended there. In fact, it remained influential and, even today, continues to occupy a significant place in these countries’ music scenes. With the strength of the anti-serial backlash in the 1970s, however, which continues to echo in some quarters, serial composers felt increasingly marginalised and stigmatised, such that they felt obliged to undertake their exploration of serial methods quietly and without fanfare (Reference StrausStraus 2009: 157).

Nevertheless, composers continued to create new serial methods. Ever the pioneer, Babbitt took his serial experimentation to a new level in 1981, beginning to compose with what he called ‘super-arrays’. That same year, Shapey began to utilise a special twelve-tone array he dubbed ‘the Mother Lode’. Much more common, however, has been the subjection of ordered pitch collections to serial procedures within the context of otherwise freely and instinctively constructed music. Indeed, for many decades now, there has been much less of a sense amongst composers that one must be a ‘serial composer’ to write serial music. The ‘us/them’ mentality of the post-war period is, thankfully, long gone, and serial methods are most often employed alongside many others. Canadian minimalist Ann Southam, for example, used twelve-tone procedures in many of her works, sometimes combining them with jazz or minimalist techniques, as in her largely tonal Full Circles (1996) and Rivers (1979) (Reference YatesYates 2021). In works like his 1979 Sparrows, Joseph Schwantner provides a similar example from across the border, applying a systematic treatment to the twelve-tone aggregate, but doing so amidst tonal-sounding areas, periods of harmonic stasis, and the use of cyclic patterns (Reference StrausStraus 2009: 159; Reference FolioFolio 1985). Serialism has had a major impact in the United States and Canada. It looks likely to continue to play a role in composers’ musical explorations as this century continues.

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.

Serialism prompted sharply divergent responses from composers, listeners, and arts officials in the Soviet Union. Ukrainian composer Valentyn Sylvestrov remembered being struck by Anton Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments (1931–4) in the early 1960s:

His colleague Vitaly Godzyatsky remarked about the same period:

Despite the attraction to listening perpendicularly among these young Soviet composers and their audiences, prettiness, and wide accessibility, remained vital categories for arts officials in the USSR, who often weighed in on serialism in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, when it was usually referred to in both specialist and non-specialist publications as dodecaphony, an esoteric word that further highlighted its strangeness and foreignness. No louder critic emerged than Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, who declared in 1963:

As the transcript of these remarks notes, members of the audience were in full agreement, shouting ‘right!’ as Khrushchev reached the peak of his indignation.

Khrushchev was not alone in his dismissal of serialism. Two years earlier composer and critic Sergey Aksyuk had singled out a specific Soviet composer and a specific composition for roiling the waters, using the typically extravagant invective of music criticism in the USSR:

Needless to say, such criticisms mounted over the course of the 1960s as serialism became more pervasive among young Soviet composers and theorists. ‘So what is it: a technique or an ideology?’ composer Dmitri Kabalevsky asked with feigned innocence in 1965. A member of his audience shouted: ‘A technique!’ ‘No,’ shouted Kabalevsky, ‘it is not a technique! A system that is incompatible with the art of the people is not a technique but an ideology!’ (Reference VlasovaVlasova 2014: 107). Technique or ideology? Music or politics? The categories were intertwined, mutually reinforcing. Denying ideology itself became an ideology, a variant of the ideology of absolute music. Decades later, the unrepentant Volkonsky told musicologist Elena Dubinets: ‘All of my life was a protest against Soviet power. And dodecaphony served that purpose, although not it alone. It wasn’t a political act; it was a musical action. In the USSR we wanted to write music that did not resemble socialist realism’ (quoted in Reference DubinetsDubinets 2010: 61).

Despite some twelve-tone experimentation in the 1920s by Ukranian or Russian composers both at home and abroad (including, for instance, Nikolai Roslavets, Yefim Golyshev, and Nicolas Obouhow), serialism arose in the USSR only some three decades later, in the middle of the 1950s, with the Geneva-born, repatriated Volkonsky its first practitioner (see Reference KholopovKholopov 1999; Reference KholopovKholopov 1983; Reference BazayevBazayev 2009; Reference GojowyGojowy 1980; Reference Gojowy and KolesnikovGojowy and Kolesnikov 2001; Reference SegallSegall 2018). It was imported. And as an import, it roused fascination and suspicion in equal measure. Twelve-tone music in the USSR was both curiosity and compositional plaything. But it was also a serious tool with which composers earnestly tried to create art of contemporary significance and relevance. It entered an environment of musical poverty buffeted by waves of abundance, or hints of abundance, from abroad, conveyed and broadcast by a variety of witting and unwitting messengers (Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2020). The stark aesthetic framework of the time initially forced composers, listeners, performers, critics, and cultural watchdogs to make a choice between decisive rejection or open-armed embrace. More refined appropriations became possible only gradually, later.

The engagement by Soviet musicians, critics, and listeners of all persuasions with serial methods of all persuasions is one of the clearest signs of the worldwide dominance and prestige of serial techniques in the later 1950s and 1960s well beyond Western Europe and the United States (pace Reference StrausStraus 1999a; see Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2010). Along with jazz, serialism was a valuable export commodity in the cultural Cold War between the USA and the USSR, and in some cases, in both countries, the two (jazz and serialism) went hand in hand.

In the USSR, serial music was as contested as it was anywhere else in the post-war era. Perhaps more so, for as the statements quoted above by Khrushchev, Aksyuk, and Kabalevsky indicate, the stakes were higher. Khrushchev probably was the only world leader of his stature to comment on serial music at that, or any other, time. In the United States, neither Eisenhower nor Kennedy ever weighed in on musical techniques, nor did Johnson or Nixon. In the United States, it remained the remit of composers, for as Milton Babbitt famously argued, these highly intellectualised compositional approaches were ill suited for the popular marketplace and consequently belonged among specialists in the academy (Reference BabbittBabbitt 1958; Reference PeyserPeyser 1969). In the USSR, by contrast, serial music was debated as a social good by composers, performers, critics, and arts authorities. What role could and should this music play in this (or any other) society? What did (or could) these unfamiliar sounds mean? Serialism’s increasing use in the Soviet Union over the late 1950s and after raised basic questions about influence and originality, about meaning, form, and content, and about self and other.

The serial techniques that provoked such ferocious debate, generated by composers compelled, as Sylvestrov admitted, by a blend of youthful inexperience, naïveté, ambition, and enthusiasm, were deemed by arts officials and more conservative writers to have failed on almost all fronts (even though some of them later tried their own hands at them). Composers and, especially, sympathetic audiences, such as the physicists and film-makers Godzyatsky praised, heard serialism as a demonstration of aesthetic, and by extension sociopolitical, freedom. But these listeners were ill equipped to judge musical details. A composition’s overall avant-garde aura, or, as important, the avant-garde aura of its creators and performers, the venue in which it was heard, as well as the other listeners it attracted – its ‘scene’ – mattered most of all (Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2009, 179–215).

Soviet officials such as Khrushchev, Aksyuk, and Kabalevsky publicly and privately condemned serialism for focusing too narrowly on form instead of content, even as foreign critics complained Soviet serial composers merely imitated (in a rudimentary fashion) better known (to them) Western examples (Reference Brody and OncleyBrody and Oncley 1968; Reference HenahanHenahan 1980). The writers of serial music in the USSR could not win, just as any creator at the periphery of a global marketplace dominated by the centre cannot win: the rules were stacked against them. Because of these divergent forces, as well as their own creative evolution, most of the young Soviet composers who experimented so eagerly with serial techniques in the early and mid-1960s had moved on to other approaches by the end of the decade. Serialism acted as a crucial proving ground as they developed their own personal compositional voices.

The remainder of the introductory overview that follows is by no means exhaustive. It instead briefly discusses serialism’s varied formal and sociopolitical meanings and implications – its aesthetics and, to a lesser degree, its mechanics – in the USSR, by examining the central figures in Soviet serialism and by pointing to representative compositions, performances, publications, and recordings (see Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2009). This chapter is particularly concerned with the aural culture of serialism in the post-war USSR as well as with thinking about serialism as both performative presence and material artifact.

Soviet Serialism, Exported

In 1968, the West German publisher Gerig, based in Cologne, issued a two-volume set called New Soviet Piano Music (Neue Sowjetischen Klaviermusik), one of the first publications of Soviet serial music outside the USSR. Edited by Rudolf Lück, these volumes offer an invaluable encapsulation of Soviet serialism near the end of its period of greatest fascination and contention. Alongside non-serial compositions for children in the first volume by Dmitri Kabalevsky, Aram Khachaturyan, Georgi Sviridov, and the less-known Estonian composer Anti Marguste, the fifteen short compositions in the collection include several influential compositions from the history of Soviet serialism written by key figures in its development, sampling as well its wide geographic reach – Estonian, Armenian, Ukrainian, and Russian: Arvo Pärt, Arno Babadjanian, Valentyn Sylvestrov, Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, Vitaly Godzyatsky, and Alemdar Karamanov, as well as Dmitri Shostakovich (although his 1927 Aphorisms excerpted in volume 2 are an early, non-serial grouping) (see Table 15.1).

There were notable omissions, which will be discussed further below: Volkonsky, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Nikolai Karetnikov, to name just three. (All the composers in the collection are men.) The absence of these composers was not for lack of trying: Ukrainian conductor Igor Blazhkov, Evgeny Mravinsky’s assistant with the Leningrad Philharmonic from 1963 to 1968 and a principal driver for new music creation, performance, and export in the USSR during the 1960s (and after), tried to convince the West Germans to include more adventurous material, including Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta, Volodymyr Zahortsev’s Rhythms (Ritmy, 1967–9), and more of Sylvestrov’s Triad (1962), for Lück had included only the second of its three movements (Reference Schmelz and Gienow-HechtSchmelz 2015: 211). Yet as his primary correspondent in the matter, musicologist Fred Prieberg, told him, Gerig wanted to include easier compositions by safer composers to offset the more adventurous offerings, thereby currying favour both with the music-buying German public and the Soviet authorities (Reference Schmelz and Gienow-HechtSchmelz 2015: 211–12). In its transmission and dissemination abroad, the Lück volumes were very much of their time and place, a document reflecting the contentious (and far from clear-cut) back and forth of the cultural Cold War. Regardless, for Western European and Anglo-American audiences it helped solidify a still-forming canon of new music in the USSR (Reference Schmelz and HallSchmelz 2017).

The Lück collection engages with how to play and teach serial music: arranged in order of progressive difficulty, it had pedagogical intent. Yet it also engaged with how to hear serial music. The movement from compositions for children to abstract serial compositions is gradual, inviting programmatic connections between Khachaturyan’s “Lyado Is Sick” – a portrait of an ailing, bored child – and Godzyatsky’s Ruptures of Flatness (1963), not in their specifics but in the indication of a programme – a story of some sort – behind each. The more orthodox and the more avant-garde compositions also share generic similarities. The subtitle of Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta, his first serial composition – and the first in the post-war USSR – was ‘fantasia ricercata’, and many of the other early serial experiments in the USSR used neutral generic labels, as was the case in the Lück volume with Schnittke’s Variations on a Chord (1965) and Denisov’s Variations (1961) or Sylvestrov’s ‘Serenade’ from his Triad, itself an ironic, ambiguous name, given that only flickers of conventional tonal triads appear in this section of the composition. Although Pärt’s Toccatina and Fughetta from his early Partita are not serial, they point the way to the serial experiments in his later Symphony no. 1, ‘Polyphonic’ (1963–4), whose two movements are called, respectively, ‘Canons’ and ‘Prelude and Fugue’ (cf. Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2002: 233–41; Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2009: 222–5). Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta, an absent presence hovering over the entire compendium, concludes with a toccata in all but name, as does the final movement in Sylvestrov’s ‘Serenade’ in the Lück collection (Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2009: 84–88). As in the early serial compositions by Schoenberg, Webern, and others, neoclassical attributes – fugues, toccatas, canons, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century arrangements of melody and accompaniment, or, at an even more basic level, familiar patterns of textual and dynamic tension and release, thickening and thinning – structured serialism’s otherwise novel techniques (if not its ideology) in the USSR.

Contemporary Soviet listening guides for these ancestral gestures and genres provide some help in hearing the music in Lück’s collection historically. Sviridov’s ‘Little Toccata’ (1948) appeared on an LP recorded by pianist Dmitri Blagoy just a few years after the Lück collection, in 1971. Blagoy prefaced each movement of Sviridov’s group of children’s pieces with a brief introduction for his young listeners. Before the Toccata, Blagoy said:

If the first compositions in the Lück collection had clear ‘contents’ thanks to their descriptive titles – the wandering harmonies of the sick child in Khachaturyan’s composition, or the ball playing in Kabalevsky’s, to say nothing of Marguste’s animal portrait or Gliere’s evocation of the imaginary East (a familiar – to Western ears – exoticised Russia) – the meanings of the later compositions were more opaque.

Blagoy left the interpretation of Sviridov’s innocuous Toccata to the imaginations of his young listeners. Yet when renowned, provocative pianist Maria Yudina first played Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta at Moscow’s Gnesin Institute on 6 May 1961, she gave her (adult) audience firm instructions: ‘This composition is very difficult, and you might not understand it after hearing it once, therefore I will play it twice. I ask you not to applaud after the first time’ (quoted in Reference PekarskyPekarsky 2007: 25; see also Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2009: 90–1). Rather than inviting listeners to rely on their imaginations, she invited them to suspend judgement. Historian Jacques Barzun made a similar exhortation in a locus classicus of the post-war modernist attitude towards the audience, when he addressed listeners in New York, within days of Yudina’s Moscow performance. At the opening concert of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio held at Columbia University in New York City on 9 and 10 May 1961, Barzun declared: ‘I suggest … that we are not here to like or approve but to understand’ (Reference BarzunBarzun 1964). Despite their very different social, political, and economic systems, Barzun’s and Yudina’s audiences had some characteristics in common. Both Barzun and Yudina spoke to select, in-the-know listeners. And both audiences were in retreat, one from over-accessible commercialism, one from sociopolitical control that enforced its own over-accessible aesthetics. Notwithstanding Yudina’s exhortation, like those at Columbia University at the early May 1961 concerts, dedicated audiences in the USSR sought to hear serial compositions precisely because they were new, different, and difficult. They were inaccessible on many levels (practically and, often, musically), but as a result they represented freedom, a freedom felt rather than understood. In a 1967 article about Sylvestrov in the Soviet youth magazine Iunost’, the author reacted with surprise: ‘All the music by Sylvestrov that I heard was very contemporary and new in terms of its technical and expressive means, but my attention did not concentrate on that newness: while listening, I sensed freedom, simplicity, naturalness. Exactly the naturalness of this music surprised me’ (Reference GorbanevskaiaGorbanevskaia 1967).

Learning, Theorising, and Analysing ‘Naturalness’

‘Naturalness’ was a watchword in aesthetic debates about serialism in the Soviet Union. Serial composers insisted their music was ‘natural’; their opponents, by contrast, insisted it was an abomination of ‘normal’ – that is, tonal – musical practice. The most committed serial advocates and interpreters – theorists such as Yuri Kholopov, Mikhail Tarakanov, and Edison Denisov – treated serialism as an innocuous tendency and in many cases framed it as an understandable outgrowth of tonal practice, something that could be discussed without raised voices (see Reference TarakanovTarakanov 1968; Reference TarakanovTarakanov 1966a; Reference TarakanovTarakanov 1966b; Reference DenisovDenisov 1969; Reference Denisov and TsenovaDenisov 1999; Reference KholopovKholopov 1983; Reference Schmelz and MorrisonSchmelz 2008: 507–15; Reference SegallSegall 2018). For them, ‘naturalness’ also meant normal, with connotations of coolness, dispassion, and objectivity. The culture of serial analysis in the USSR developed slowly and belatedly because most of these scores were published only after a lengthy delay, or not at all; many remain difficult to obtain to the present day. Recordings were few and far between, circulating largely as magnitizdat, surreptitiously distributed bootlegs. Aural apprehension remained the prime approach to analysis and, in the Soviet Union (as elsewhere around the world), for most listeners the technical specifics of serial compositions mattered little.

Soviet and, later, Russian theorists even came to use a term that spoke volumes. They called the overarching category of composition not serialism but ‘twelve-toneness’ (dvenatsatitonovost’), of which both serialism and dodecaphony were considered subsets (Reference KurbatskaiaKurbatskaia 1996; Reference Schmelz and FaySchmelz 2004: 324–6; Reference CairnsCairns 2012). Elsewhere, I have described the theoretical hierarchy they developed as the Soviet serial bullseye (Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2009: 135; see also Reference CairnsCairns 2012: 115–16). This arrangement of concentric circles has dodecaphony as its middle point – a set arrangement of all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale that governs every pitch (or nearly every pitch) in a composition. (Multiple or integral serialism is, in this context, a specific subset related to this category as well as to the particular Russian understanding of serialism.) Moving outwards, the other circles become progressively looser: serialism consists of a set arrangement (a row) of fewer than twelve pitches that determines the content of a composition; ‘twelve-tone’ (distinct from dodecaphonic) consists of multiple, non-determinative twelve-tone rows within a single composition; and the outer circle, atonal or ‘twelve-tonish’ indicates music that sounds like but is not strictly twelve-tone. To further muddy the waters, Svetlana Kurbatskaya, a pathbreaking theorist of Russian serial practice, presents an additional six categories of ‘twelve-toneness’, most based on the practice of specific composers (Reference KurbatskaiaKurbatskaia 1996: 32–40; Reference CairnsCairns 2012).

The compositions in the Lück collection range across the serial bullseye. The first serial (in the Western sense) composition in the volume is Babadjanian’s dodecaphonic (in the Soviet sense) ‘Intermezzo’, part of his Six Pictures (Shest’ kartin (1965)), the first serial composition from the USSR to be recorded and released on LP (in the year of its composition) (Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2002: 304–5; Reference BabadzhanianBabadzhanian 1965). The six musical pictures of the title were made palatable by the national (Armenian) background of its author, which allowed colleagues and critics alike to explain away their unusual colorations. Babadjanian’s ‘Intermezzo’ consists of repeated statements of the prime form of the initial row form at its initial transposition level. Only at inflection points (the middle, the end) is a retrograde of that initial row heard (see bb. 11–13 and the last five bars). Sylvestrov’s aphoristic, Webern-like ‘Serenade’ and Denisov’s Variations are also dodecaphonic (in the Soviet sense) (Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2002: 145–6; Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2009: 135–7 and 140–5; Reference 372CairnsCairns 2013). In his Variations on a Chord, Schnittke crafts a kind of loose dodecaphony; influenced by Webern’s own Piano Variations op. 27, he borrowed its second movement’s hypostatisation of pitch to explore the polystylistic possibilities of a single twelve-tone collection. It was a sui generis blurring of twelve-tonish and dodecaphonic approaches that Schnittke later came to dislike (Reference Shul’ginShul’gin 2004: 85).

Godzyatsky’s Ruptures of Flatness (Razryvy ploskostei (1963)) exposes with special clarity the social, historical, and aesthetic cross-currents rocking many of the young Soviet composers in their early serial compositions. He called his short piano work a ‘sufficiently sharp, athematic composition, but rhythmically impulsive, with elements of a sense of genre [zhanrovost’] аnd even jazz’, also influenced by his study at the time of Chopin’s Scherzo no. 1. He said it was ‘based … to a large degree on a programme. In the rhythmic tensions, and the dissonant, fragmentary constructions there is a picture of the world and the life of microparticles’ (Reference LuninaLunina 2013: 396, 410 and 413–14). Ukrainian pianist Evgeny Gromov goes further, saying the composition rendered a detailed narrative of nuclear reaction, explosion, and decay inspired by Godzyatsky’s reading of Robert Jungk’s Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (1956), as well as by his study of Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke I–VIII (1952–4) and Stravinsky’s late scores (Reference GromovGromov 2018). Twelve-tonish, Ruptures of Flatness is driven by recurrent, related gestures and chords, but also by extreme registral displacement, generating a sort of pointillism. There is no unifying twelve-tone row (or rows) but a thoroughgoing attempt regularly to exhaust the complete chromatic (seen clearly in the gapped entrances of its first twelve bars) (Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2002: 143–4). Karamanov’s Prologue, Idea, and Epilogue (1962 or 1963) amplifies this tendency: exhibiting twelve-toneness at its most twelve-tonish, it follows the law’s complicated yet amorphous spirit rather than its letter (Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2002: 140–3). It was also the only composition in the Lück volumes to include specific instructions for realising the various clusters (including tremolo clusters) and indefinite rhythms in its second movement.

As Volkonsky said about his first engagement with serialism: ‘from the very beginning of my study of dodecaphony, I broke its strict laws and treated them very freely, and then I devised my own system of permutations’ (Reference DubinetsDubinets 2010: 123; Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2009: 88). This flexible, intuitive attitude, shared by almost all Soviet composers using serial techniques, of any generation, explains how someone such as Shostakovich could incorporate twelve-tonish materials into his music, starting with his Seven Verses of Alexander Blok op. 127, and Violin Concerto no. 2 op. 129 (both 1967), and ending with his last composition, his Viola Sonata op. 147 (1975), without becoming a serial composer in any sense recognisable to Anglo-American theory or musicology (Reference Schmelz and FaySchmelz 2004; Reference BrownBrown 2015).

Volkonsky in short order introduced further novel approaches in his Suite of Mirrors (Siuita zerkal (1960), mirroring) and Laments of Shchaza (Zhaloby shchazy (1962), rotations). Denisov elaborated on the serial techniques in his Variations in his seminal Sun of the Incas (Solntse inkov (1964)) and Laments (1969), both of which blend serialism with folkloric elements. Denisov also serialised multiple musical parameters in several 1960s compositions, among them Italian Songs (Ital’ianskie pesni (1964)) and Five Stories after Herr Keuner (Piat’ istorii o gospodine Koinere (1966)) (Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2009: 166–71; Reference Tsenova and KholopovTsenova and Kholopov 1993: 84–9). Schnittke’s Variations on a Chord post-dates most of his stricter serial compositions, including his Music for Chamber Orchestra (1964) and Music for Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1964), which included a blending of jazz and serialism in its final, third movement (Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2009: 233–57). Nikolai Karetnikov’s Lento-Variations (1960), Violin Sonata (1961), String Quartet (1963), and Symphony no. 4 (1963) all demonstrate a more committed serial approach (Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2002: 127–35). By contrast, Sofia Gubaidulina only briefly used serial techniques in her Five Etudes for harp, double bass, and percussion (1965) and Night in Memphis (Noch’ v Memfise, 1968), before turning to structured compositional approaches based on various rhythmic series (Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2009: 261–8; Reference TsenovaTsenova 2000).

The inventiveness with which Soviet composers approached serial techniques reflected the somewhat haphazard ways they learned about it. Because they were not taught serialism as part of their formal conservatory training in the 1950s and 1960s, they were left to their own devices, relying on materials mailed across the border or brought in surreptitiously by approved official guests, or encountered on their own trips abroad, most importantly to the Warsaw Autumn festival (Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2009: chapter 1; Reference JakelskiJakelski 2017). But there were inadvertent, official Soviet ways to learn too. On Music Living and Dead (O muzyke zhivoi i mertvoi) by musicologist Grigory Shneerson, the first edition of which was published in 1960, included a chart of the various row forms as well as capsule analyses of the rows in various compositions by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Berg, which the young composers eagerly studied even as they ignored Shneerson’s rote critiques of these composers (Reference ShneersonShneerson 1960: 171–2, 182–5, and passim). Its second edition in 1964 included significantly more examples, among them images of graphic scores: Sylvano Bussotti’s Five Pieces for David Tudor (1959) and John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–8) (Reference ShneersonShneerson 1964: 342–3). Around this time, many Soviet composers also began using graphic notation to either combine serial and aleatory approaches in their own scores, as in Pärt’s Diagramme (1964) or to abandon the first for the second, as in Sylvestrov’s Projections for harpsichord, vibraphone, and bells (1965), or the second movement of Karamanov’s Prologue, Idea, and Epilogue (Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2009: 226–9 and 258).

Censorship and Control

Shneerson’s book indicates the fluidity and flexibility of musical censorship in the Soviet Union in its last decades. The arts were heavily monitored and controlled, but there were often ways around spoken (or written) and, as often, unspoken (and unwritten) official prohibitions. There were many exceptions. After the fall of the Soviet Union, near the end of his life, Volkonsky was justifiably, if belatedly, recognised for his pioneering work on behalf of serial music in the Soviet Union. He had emigrated to Western Europe from the USSR in 1973, and his name faded immediately from all official publications. But in the 1960s, harassed into near silence by the Soviet musical establishment, Volkonsky was at best a rumour outside its borders, his music more talked about than heard.

Sylvestrov, by contrast, became the most prominent Soviet composer abroad, vying with Denisov, Schnittke, and Pärt. Sylvestrov, not Volkonsky, was awarded a Koussevitzky Prize in 1966 and second prize at the International Gaudeamus Composers’ Competition in 1970. Yet, as it had Volkonsky’s, Soviet censorship cut off Sylvestrov’s career and coincided, indeed arguably helped prod along, a dramatic stylistic shift in his music. Remarkably, Sylvestrov’s first appearances in the West themselves were censored, ostensibly to protect him from the type of blowback that had befallen novelist Boris Pasternak in the USSR after he was awarded (and was forced to decline) the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. At a concert at the New School in New York City on 13 March 1964, Paul Jacobs played Sylvestrov’s Suite for Piano (actually his Five Pieces (1961)) and four of the Signs that comprise Triad’s first part (also 1961) credited in the programme only to a ‘Contemporary Soviet 12-tone composer (Name withheld)’ (Reference Schmelz and HallSchmelz 2017: 427–9). Because of the cultural Cold War, these compositions carried a mystique. Held up as exotic creations, born amid an atmosphere of repression, they drew attention as foreign audiences tuned in to see what all the fuss was about.

Discussions of music in the Soviet Union often exaggerate or mischaracterise the nature and extent of its censorship. Yet beyond the common, exasperating delays between composition and performance or publication, lasting years or decades, there could be severe repercussions for writing and playing serial and other new music. Because of his enthusiastic programming of adventurous Soviet scores, including Sylvestrov’s music, during his tenure in Leningrad, Blazhov was fired from his conducting job there in 1968. Only a few months later his wife, Galina Mokreeva, a young musicologist and an outspoken proponent of new music herself, committed suicide (Reference Schmelz and HallSchmelz 2017: 419–20; Reference Schmelz and Gienow-HechtSchmelz 2015: 212–13). Sylvestrov himself was ousted from the Ukrainian Union of Composers in 1970; he was reinstated only in early 1973. It was at just this time that his final pivot away from serialism began (Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2009: 276–7; Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2020: 104–6 and passim).

After Serialism, Hearing Serialism

Many of Sylvestrov’s compatriots also retreated from serialism: Schnittke’s serial compositions led him to polystylism, and Pärt’s led him to tintinnabuli (cf. Reference SchmelzSchmelz 2020; Reference Siitan, Bouteneff, Engelhardt and SalerSiitan 2021; Reference May, Bouteneff, Engelhardt and SalerMay 2021; Reference MayMay 2016, esp. chapter 2; Reference KarnesKarnes 2021). Schnittke consistently vilified serialism as an ideology even as he occasionally employed it as a technique, although it never constituted a dominant aspect of his approach after the late 1960s (see Reference Segall, Bazayev and SegallSegall 2020, esp. 245–6; and Reference PolinPolin 1984: 10–11). Others continued unapologetically writing serial music. Following his lead, Denisov’s students and younger associates treated serialism as a ‘lingua franca’ (Reference QuillenQuillen 2010: 138). As musicologist William Quillen writes, ‘Denisov’s celebration of complexity helped motivate many of his followers to fill their serial compositions with increasingly esoteric, hidden structures’ (Reference QuillenQuillen 2010: 138). Many employed what Quillen terms ‘Serialism-Plus’, or various serial hybrids, including ‘serialism-plus-aleatory, serialism-plus-sonorika, serialism-plus-spectralism, and serialism-plus-minimalism’ (Reference QuillenQuillen 2010: 146). Examples include Viktor Yekimovsky’s Doppelkammervariationen (1989); Faradzh Karayev’s Klänge einer traurigen Nacht (1989); as well as Alexander Vustin’s important Zaitsev’s Letter (Pis’mo Zaitseva (1990)) (Reference QuillenQuillen 2010: 130–321).

Old aesthetic categories die hard. Five years after the end of the USSR, Kurbatskaya still tried to balance the seminal socialist realist demands of form and content, technique and ideology, closing her groundbreaking 1996 discussion by asking how one was meant to listen to serialism. Her answer, in part, relied on asserting that ‘serial-dodecaphonic music certainly reflects the spirit of the times in its contents’. But more than that, ‘twelve-toneness represents a new, higher stage of the development of musical consciousness’ (Reference KurbatskaiaKurbatskaia 1996: 317). Few would seriously argue this historicist point today; it was but a belated voicing of the assertion many wanted to make more vociferously in the 1960s, when they had felt it so strongly. Near the end of his life, Denisov objected to those who betrayed a ‘definite snobbery’ and a ‘negative attitude’ about serial techniques. His justification was familiar: ‘serial techniques arose naturally and they arose everywhere’ (Reference Denisov and Shul’ginDenisov and Shul’gin 2004: 139). But as Denisov well knew, serialism did not arise naturally in the Soviet Union. It took dogged effort and energetic experimentation by many composers, together with a paradoxical social engagement by composers, performers, listeners, and audiences predicated on a lack of Soviet-approved social engagement. Or, as Kurbatskaya suggests, composing, performing, and hearing serialism in the USSR required embracing new, challenging contents in new, challenging forms during new, challenging times.

In his influential Music in Latin America, Gerard Béhague divided its musics into the dominant ‘folkloristic nationalism’ and ‘counter-currents’ (Reference BéhagueBéhague 1979). Dodecaphony and serialism, the subjects of this chapter, form but one of the many and disparate ‘counter-currents’ in Béhague’s account. This somewhat reductive binarism can be and has been critiqued (cf. Lorenz n.d.; Reference MadridMadrid 2008), but it is largely true that serialism’s adherents tended to view themselves as an avant-garde in opposition to the nationalist establishment which dominated musical life throughout Latin America at virtually every level. This state of affairs lasted roughly until the 1960s, when the serial avant-garde achieved modest mainstream and institutional acceptance, although by that point the link between serialism and the avant-garde had become tenuous. As will be seen, the history of dodecaphony and serialism in Latin America thus to an extent mirrors that of its counterparts in Europe and North America, but with some notable peculiarities. This history not only provides an important facet of the region’s music history, but it also touches on crucial issues beyond that, such as the way artistic innovations are disseminated; the role of migration and national, regional, and international networks, among them the importance of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM); the varying connections between aesthetic ideas and ideological and political principles; and debates about progress and tradition, national culture and universalism. As in other regional contexts, the focus on dodecaphony and serialism requires looking beyond genius composers and canonical masterworks, since many of the key figures feature at best as footnotes in general histories of twentieth-century music, and seminal works may have been heard by only a handful of people.

It goes without saying that this short account cannot provide comprehensive coverage of any and all approaches to dodecaphony and serialism in such a large and diverse area. The adoption of dodecaphony has varied widely across the region: while it gained a foothold in a Europeanised metropolis such as Buenos Aires as early as the 1930s, it failed to make a significant impact in other areas before the 1950s or 1960s, if at all. There were two regional dodecaphonic networks that seemed to have been largely independent, if not oblivious, of one another: one in the south, centred on Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, and another in the north, centred on Panama, Venezuela, and Mexico.

The history of serialism in Latin America starts in 1934 with, appropriately enough, Primera composición dodecafónica by Juan Carlos Paz. Paz was largely self-taught, and, with the exception of a period of study in Paris during which he did not focus on composition, rarely left Buenos Aires. In 1929, Paz joined forces with Jacobo Ficher, Juan José Castro, José María Castro, and Gilardo Gilardi, the leading, broadly nationalist and neoclassical composers of the day, to found the Grupo Renovación, which, in 1932, became the Argentine section of the ISCM. Paz’s early work was in a similar style to the other composers within the Grupo, characterised by (extended) tonal and bitonal composition, but this changed drastically when he adopted twelve-note technique without an intervening period of free atonality (or any other method, for that matter). The immediacy of this switch may be a reason why, for him, dodecaphony seemed to be allied to atonality, and both were opposed to nationalist and neoclassical approaches and aesthetics.

According to Daniela Fugellie’s account, Paz reported in a letter from January 1934 to his friend, the German-Uruguayan musicologist Francisco Curt Lange, that he was working on a ‘Composition on the Twelve Notes’. In his memoirs, Paz reported that he had become aware of dodecaphony through the four-part article that Schoenberg’s student Egon Wellesz had published in the Parisian journal La revue musicale in 1926, a general article devoid of technical issues; in addition, he had a score of Schoenberg’s Woodwind Quintet op. 26 (1923–4), one of Schoenberg’s earliest twelve-note compositions (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 149). What proved decisive for his further development was his work as secretary for the Grupo Renovación, through which, in its capacity as Argentine section of the ISCM, he entered into correspondence with many European composers, many of whom pursued similar ideas. Fugellie lists Paul Pisk (Austrian section), Alois Hába and Karel Reiner (Czechoslovak section), Józef Koffler (Polish section), Slavko Osterc (Yugoslav section), Alfredo Casella and Gian Francesco Malipiero (Italian section), Paul Sanders (Dutch section), and Edward Dent (President), in addition to further individual composers. Many, although not all, of these were twelve-note composers or closely allied with Schoenberg: Pisk, for example, was, like Wellesz, a Schoenberg pupil, and he became one of the most important contacts for Paz and his circle.

The most immediate support for Paz, however, came from Koffler. When Paz sent his first twelve-note composition for consideration for the ISCM’s Annual Festival 1935 in Prague, Koffler, a member of the jury, wrote back to Paz correcting his technical and stylistic mistakes. For his part, Koffler, who was not from Schoenberg’s immediate circle, had himself received a similar letter from Schoenberg, to whom he had sent his 15 Variations on a Twelve-Note Series op. 9a (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 152). Paz’s composition was rejected, although his Passacaglia for Orchestra op. 28 would be performed during the ISCM’s Annual Festival 1937 in Paris, as his pre-dodecaphonic Sonatina for Flute and Piano had been in Amsterdam in 1933 (his post-dodecaphonic Galaxias for organ would follow, shortly after his death, in Graz in 1972) (Reference HaefeliHaefeli 1982: 493, 495, and 532). Paz seems to have lacked the means to attend these, or any other, international events; he never held any official position and had little success more generally in acquiring concert performances of his music.

In addition to the European composers listed above, Paz would over time also enter into exchanges with North American correspondents, including Ernst Krenek, Lazare Sanimsky, Nicolas Slonimsky, and Aaron Copland (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 147). Owing to this impressive network, he was well informed about international developments, despite the difficulties of finding scores or secondary literature in Buenos Aires during the 1930s and 1940s (a problem common in most of the rest of the world). Paz seems to have completed his book Arnold Schönberg o el fin de la era tonal (Arnold Schoenberg or the End of the Tonal Era) in 1949, although the work would not appear in print until almost a decade thereafter (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 282–3; Reference PazPaz 1958). The work demonstrates a good grasp of Schoenberg’s work as well as of the relevant dodecaphonic theory of the time, including seminal work by Krenek and René Leibowitz (Reference KrenekKrenek 1940; Reference LeibowitzLeibowitz 1947). As Fugellie points out, however, Paz had only received many of the scores shortly before, so his initial knowledge of dodecaphonic composition during the period from 1934 to 1949 was partial at best. As will be seen (below, p. 270), he largely lost interest in twelve-note composition thereafter.

A curious aspect of Paz’s twelve-note compositions is that, with one important exception, he only used one series in its prime form and retrograde without transpositions, inversions, or retrograde inversions. For anyone schooled in the mature works of the Second Viennese School – or most other canonic serial composition – this represents an almost inconceivable limitation. Nor did he use dodecaphony freely by restricting it to thematic or, more widely, melodic invention. On the contrary, what he valued was the method’s strictness, and in most cases, every single note is directly derived from the prime form or its retrograde. In his Introducción a la música de nuestro tiempo, which he wrote after his Schoenberg book, but which was published before it, he argued for ‘a strict mental hygiene in music, which strips it of all literary and sentimental tricks and lends it aesthetic autonomy, defined limits and spatial concretion’. These can be found primarily in ‘impersonal forms like the suite, the invention, the passacaglia, the canon or the polymelody’ (Reference PazPaz 1958: 112).

In general, his early dodecaphonic works feature the kind of dense counterpoint and motoric rhythms characteristic of Schoenberg’s earliest twelve-note works, such as the Suite for Piano op. 25 or indeed the Woodwind Quintet that Paz knew. Although Paz clearly identified with an avant-gardist position both within Argentina and Latin America and in his international alliances, some of his rhetoric is reminiscent of Jean Cocteau’s Rappel à l’ordre (Reference CocteauCocteau 1926), just as his music recalls neoclassicism and Neue Sachlichkeit, more even than Schoenberg’s work from the 1920s and 1930s did.

According to Fugellie, the apex of Paz’s dodecaphonic phase is formed by Música 1946 op. 45 (1945–7) and Dédalus, 1950 op. 46 (1950–1), which reveal Paz’s greater familiarity with the work of Schoenberg and Webern (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 278–89). Here, Paz employed what he called ‘symmetry’, a term which Fugellie adopts, despite the fact that neither of the fundamental rows is in fact symmetrical as stated, even if Paz’s concern for self-similar cells, specifically trichords, and a correspondingly reduced number of interval classes is evident. Paz had by that time performed Webern’s Variations for Piano op. 27 (1936), which provides many examples of both horizontal and vertical (palindromic) symmetry, although its fundamental row itself is not symmetrical either (in contradistinction to the palindromic row employed in his Symphony op. 21, for instance, which Paz may not have known) (cf. Reference BaileyBailey 1991: 61–2 and 109–12). In Dédalus, Paz employed all principal row transformations for the first time. In general, it is a remarkable work, on a completely different scale and level than some of his earlier dodecaphonic efforts and arguably on a par with anything else composed at the time. It therefore seems ironic that Paz abandoned dodecaphony after the work, at the very moment when he gained mastery of the technique. He did not, however, discard serialism as such and indeed explored multiple serialism through a serial ordering of rhythm and dynamics in addition to pitch in his Transformaciones canónicas op. 49 (1955) (cf. Reference Ibáñez-RichterIbáñez-Richter 2014: 237), but he seems to have regarded this as a new, and separate, direction.

Paz’s influence was not restricted to his compositions, however. It was his tireless activities as an organiser, critic, author, and teacher that inspired successive generations of composers in Argentina and beyond. Paradoxically, it may have been the break, in 1936, with his previous institutional base, the Grupo Renovación, that enabled him to find new followers and allies. This conflict seems not to have been caused by aesthetic differences, but by Paz’s affair with Sofía Knoll, an Austrian-Jewish immigrant, which caused a scandal in what was a predominantly conservative country. Significantly, Paz’s wife was none other than Eloísa García Castro, the cousin of Juan José and José Maria Castro, the leading lights of the Grupo and stalwarts of the musical establishment (Juan José was the Director of the Teatro Colón and José Maria of the Buenos Aires Municipal Band, among many other positions and honours) (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 156–). Left to his own devices, Paz founded the Conciertos de la Nueva Música (CNM) in 1937, which became the Agrupación Nueva Música (ANM) in 1944. Under this umbrella, Paz assembled a circle of like-minded composers and musicians, many of them his students. In the early years, the Hungarian émigré Estéban (István) Eitler and the writer and composer Daniel Devoto were important supporters, succeeded in later periods by Francisco Kröpfl, Mauricio Kagel, and Michael Gielen, who would become one of the leading conductors specialising in new music.

The CNM and ANM performed compositions by their members as well as the international avant-garde, focusing, if not exclusively, on the Second Viennese School. The organisation’s fortunes varied considerably, but it was always run on a shoestring budget and in semi-informal ways. The same is true of its performance venues, although it saw something of a golden age during a period of left-wing government when it was able to hold concerts in the Teatro del Pueblo, a home for progressive art, culture, and politics in the centre of the city. In a letter to Lange, Paz spoke of enthusiastic audiences of at least 550 people during the 1938 season (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 213). Only the absence of a piano caused practical difficulties. This period came to an end with the military coup of 1943, a moment which is more generally indicative of the specific problems faced by modernist composers in Latin America.

Throughout this period, Paz and his circle were mostly ignored if not rejected by the largely conservative, nationalist critics. The antagonistic relations with the Grupo Renovación came to a head when Paz attacked the (later-withdrawn) Sinfonia porteña (1942) by one of the most promising figures in the nationalist camp, Alberto Ginastera, in a review. For many years, the scene would be split between the internationalist, serial avant-garde around Paz and the nationalist, conservative, largely neoclassical movement headed by Ginastera (Reference BuchBuch 2007: 11).

The story of the development of dodecaphony in Brazil mostly parallels that in neighbouring Argentina, but there are some differences. The leading figure here was Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, a German immigrant who arrived in Brazil, via Switzerland, in 1937. His studies in Berlin coincided with the ‘Hindemith affair’ (cf. Reference JanikJanik 2005: 71–2), as a consequence of which Hindemith took indefinite leave from his teaching position and emigrated soon after. Koellreutter seems to have only studied with him privately but signed a petition in support of Hindemith (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 168–9). Unlike Paz and many other immigrants, he established himself fairly quickly, teaching at the Brazilian Conservatory in Rio de Janeiro (from 1937) and the São Paulo Institute of Music (1942–4). In 1939, he set up Música Viva, which became a counterpart to the CNM and ANM in Buenos Aires and was closely aligned with it; the mercurial Estéban Eitler played a role in both (as well as in the Chilean Tonus, as will be detailed below, pp. 273–4). In addition, Koellreutter regularly corresponded with Paz; another connection was their common friend Lange, who acted as a nexus and supporter of composers across Latin America. Although Koellreutter claimed to have come across the technique in Switzerland, he always stressed that what drove him to explore dodecaphony was the inquisitiveness of his pupil Cláudio Santoro (1919–89) (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 312). Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the first dodecaphonic composition in Brazil was composed by Koellreutter, namely his Inventions for woodwind trio (1940), followed by the piano piece Música 1941 (1941) and the Variations 1941 for String Quartet (1941). Santoro was not far behind, though: his Sonatas for violin and violin and piano are both from 1940, and his Pequena Toccata for piano from 1942.

In contrast to Paz, Koellreutter explored all primary dodecaphonic transformations from the start, but, again unlike Paz, he was never interested in strict adherence and only used the technique as far as he found it useful. The same can be said of his students, with the result that Brazilian twelve-note compositions can often only be identified as such through their composers’ declared intention, and it can be difficult to recognise serial structures. This difference may be a consequence of Paz and Koellreutter’s divergent personalities, but it is also possible that the essentially self-taught Paz looked to serialism as a guarantor of rigour and order for which Koellreutter, steeped as he was in traditional technique, saw less need.

Under the influence of both nationalist and Marxist ideologies, some of Koellreutter’s students – including Santoro, César Guerra-Peixe, and Eunice Katunda – also explored combinations of serialism with elements of Brazilian traditional and popular music. Not all these experiments were successful, not least in the eyes of their composers, who went on to abandon serialism altogether, even if Santoro and Katunda were to return to it in the 1960s. Nevertheless, the independence and vitality of Brazilian serialism is striking. Another specificity, in comparison with Argentina and, as will be seen (below, pp. 273–4), Chile, is the number and prominence of Koellreutter’s female students: Katunda is a key figure. Her Hommage à Schoenberg (1949) was the only Latin American composition included in the ISCM Festival in Brussels (1950), and she was an important influence on Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono, with whom she was in regular correspondence, leading, among other things, to Nono’s use of a Brazilian song in his Polifonica–Monodia–Ritmica (1951) (Reference IddonIddon 2013: 43–4; Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 394–5). At the very next ISCM Festival (1951, in Frankfurt), another composition by one of Koellreutter’s students was performed: Nininha Gregori’s Quatro líricas grecas (1950) (Reference HaefeliHaefeli 1982: 505–6; Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 358 and 396). Fugellie also lists Lavinia Viotti, Sonia Born, and Maria Lucia Mazurek among those who accompanied Koellreutter to Darmstadt in 1951 alone (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 358).

Unlike Paz, Koellreutter travelled extensively to Europe between 1948 and 1951, visiting, among others, the first and second dodecaphonic congresses in Milan (1948) and Darmstadt (1951), the ISCM Festival 1949, and the Darmstadt New Music Courses in 1949 and 1951, giving at the latter a lecture on ‘Twelve-Tone Music in Brazil’ (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 342–64). Indeed, during his first journey in 1948, he gave a course on dodecaphony in Milan which was attended by Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna, among others (the occasion on which Katunda, Nono, and Maderna first met) (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 348).

His international success contrasted with the situation he was confronted with back in Brazil, as is apparent from the epigraph at the head of this chapter. His relation to Brazil’s compositional establishment in many ways mirrors that of Paz in Argentina. In his early years, he was friends with most of his colleagues, including Camargo Guarnieri, one of the leading figures in the country’s musical life and, like virtually all his peers, a committed nationalist (second only to Heitor Villa-Lobos, who preferred to stay above the fray, however). Whether the relative unity among composers was broken by the factionalism of the avant-garde or whether nationalism had changed from a progressive and modernist position to a reactionary one probably depends on perspective. In 1950, Guarnieri published ‘An Open Letter’, a vicious attack on the unnamed Koellreutter, quoted in the epigraph (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 318). Where the affair surrounding the ‘Open Letter’ differs from the conflict between the nationalist-conservative and serialist-progressive factions elsewhere, as exemplified by the Ginastera affair in Argentina, is that Guarnieri’s ‘Open Letter’ can be understood both from a reactionary/nationalist and a Zhdanovite Communist position. It was accordingly embraced by both the right and the extreme left (Reference EggEgg 2006; Reference SilvaSilva 1999: 184). The prevalence of the latter and the influence of the Partido Comunista Brasileiro (PCB) is a peculiarity of the Brazilian situation. Among Koellreutter’s students, Santoro and Katunda were members of the PCB, and both visited the Second International Congress of Composers and Music Critics 1948 in Prague, where the Zhdanov doctrine of socialist realism was proclaimed (Reference CarrollCarroll 2006: 37–49). Santoro adopted the party line wholesale, denounced his teacher, and supported Guarnieri’s letter. Katunda was more ambivalent, but she too toed the line in support of Guarnieri, although she apologised publicly to Koellreutter in 1979. Others, notably his student Edino Krieger, continued to support Koellreutter publicly (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 401).

Meanwhile, dodecaphony also took hold in Chile, where the organisation Tonus was set up largely on the model of the ANM and was active from 1947 to 1959. One of the links to Buenos Aires was none other than Estéban Eitler, Paz’s student, who moved between Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, but whose centre of activities for many years was Santiago de Chile. Eitler is a particularly fascinating figure who epitomises the immigrant experience. He was enthralled by the traditional music of the Quechua and Paraná, adopted impressionism, post-impressionism, pentatonicism, neoclassicism, and dodecaphony in short order, and, among many other activities as composer and flautist in virtually all spheres of musical life, was the leader of a popular dance band called Don Esteban y sus Trotamundos (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 178–94). But the leading figure in Tonus was the Dutch immigrant Fré Focke (1910–89). Focke was a student of Willem Pijper, the leading Dutch composer of his generation, and, uniquely among Latin America-based composers, Anton Webern, if apparently only for a brief period in the 1940s. What singles him out from the many other European, often Jewish, immigrants, is that, apparently unbeknownst to the generally left-leaning avant-garde and his fellow immigrants, he came ‘from the other side’. Although there is no evidence that Focke was an active Nazi, his European career took place largely in Germany and German-occupied Vienna. The chief reason for this was the operatic career of his wife, the contralto Ria Focke, who went to Germany in 1936 and who, among other activities, performed Erda at the Bayreuth Festival from 1939 (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 194–8; Reference Kutsch and RiemensKutsch and Riemens 2012: 1500). After the war, the Fockes briefly returned to the Netherlands, where they would have been less than welcome, before moving to Sweden, where the Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau suggested they move to Chile, which they did in 1947 (Reference FugellieFugellie 2018: 198). Like Koellreutter in Brazil, Focke was able to establish himself relatively quickly, and Tonus had a less antagonistic relationship to the country’s musical establishment than its Argentine and Brazilian counterparts.

As already mentioned (above, p. 267), serialism seems to have developed in the north of Latin America independently of the south, and it tended to arrive not directly from Europe but from the United States. Pride of place has to go to the Black Panamanian composer Roque Cordero (1917–2008). Cordero won a scholarship to the University of Minnesota in 1943, attracting the attention of Ernst Krenek, with whom he studied before returning to Panama and becoming a leading figure in its musical life. In addition, he continued to have a distinguished parallel career in the United States (Reference StallingsStallings 2015). He embraced dodecaphony from the 1940s and left his mark on the musical lives of neighbouring countries, notably at the regular Festival de Música in Caracas, which, from 1954, attempted to put Venezuela on the musical map. According to Reference AstorMiguel Astor (2008), the Festival was marked by the ‘conflict between nationalism and modernism’. In Manuel Laufer’s account, while the supremacy of nationalism was not openly questioned at the first Festival in 1954, conflict broke out into the open at its second iteration in 1957, which featured, among other things, a talk by René Leibowitz. During the Festival, Cordero emerged as ‘the most militant defender of twelve-tone technique’ with an article entitled ‘Nationalism versus Dodecaphonism?’. In it he responded to a question posed by the critic Edgardo Martín, who, in a review of Cordero’s Second Symphony, had asked ‘to what extent is it logical, convenient, and healthy (artistically speaking) for composers from America to compose in this [dodecaphonic] manner?’. Cordero retorted that ‘that question is unnecessary. Must it be considered illogical for a man of today to express himself in the language of his times?’ He went on to critique the dichotomy between the two concepts: ‘nationalism and dodecaphonism are two different things, but they are not antagonistic’, thereby criticising what he saw as a conflation between technical means and aesthetic principles (Reference LauferLaufer 2015: 61–3). Although Cordero was a strict serial composer (Reference OroszOrosz 2018), there is certainly nothing cerebral or esoteric in his compositions, even if explicitly nationalist elements are harder to detect.

One prominent ally was the great Cuban writer and musicologist Alejo Carpentier, then exiled in Venezuela. Although temperamentally more drawn to musical nationalism, he argued that there was no reason to reject new techniques:

It is in this climate that Venezuelan composers, such as Alejandro Planchart, better known as a musicologist, and Rhazés Hernández López experimented with dodecaphony. Other important figures at the Caracas Festival were Rodolfo Halffter, the first Mexican composer to adopt dodecaphony with his Tres hojas de album for piano (1953), and Ginastera, who, by that time, had left his early ‘objective nationalism’ behind. Even more conservative composers were drawn to serialism at times, such as the Peruvian Enrique Iturriaga, another stalwart of the Caracas Festival, as in his Vivencias I–IV (1965) (Reference EstenssoroEstenssoro 2001).

Thus, in the 1960s, serialism could no longer be considered a ‘counter-current’ to the mainstream of ‘folkloristic nationalism’, as Béhague would have it. In many cases, old hostilities crumbled. In 1958, Ginastera composed his Second String Quartet, his first fully dodecaphonic work. This was no sudden volte-face, but the result of a long process (Reference KussKuss 2013). Nor was he alone: many composers from the nationalist or conservative camp experimented with the method at the time; even Guarnieri tasted the fruits of the ‘wild fig tree of cosmopolitanism’ in his Fifth Piano Concerto (1970) (Reference BéhagueBéhague 2001).

Of particular significance for Latin-American music was the founding in 1962 of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) under the auspices of the Instituto di Tella in Buenos Aires. Ginastera became the Director, and he showed little trace of his earlier nationalist, conservative affiliation, although much of the day-to-day teaching was in any case carried out by his assistant and former student, Gerardo Gandini. The Centre hosted leading international lights such as Luigi Dallapiccola, Luigi Nono, Iannis Xenakis, Aaron Copland, and Earle Brown, but it had an even greater impact in bringing together and energising the Latin American avant-garde. In 1967, Ginastera even installed Kröpfl, the then-Director of the Agrupación Nueva Música, his former nemesis, to direct the CLAEM’s electronic studio. According to Edgardo Herrera, ‘strict twelve-tone compositions were rare among CLAEM composers, other than required classroom exercises. A more common compositional practice consisted of employing serial procedures to generate mainly pitch and rhythmic materials and use them freely in a composition’. He mentions Marco Aurelio Vanegas’s Sonata for viola and piano and Mesías Maiguashca’s Variations for wind quartet from the student concert in 1963 as examples. His conclusion that, ‘overall, serialism was perhaps the point of entry for many composers to the world of avant-garde musical practices, but for most, it was certainly not an ending point’ is convincing. By that point, serialism, both in its dodecaphonic and multiple incarnations, was one modernist technique among others and no longer the shibboleth for entry into the avant-garde camp (if it ever was) (Reference HerreraHerrera 2020: 109–10).

Unfortunately, the Centre was forced to close in 1971, owing to a combination of the increasing political instability during the ‘Argentine Revolution’ and related economic developments that bankrupted the businesses of the di Tella family and decimated their fortune. Despite its brief existence, the Centre profoundly shaped many composers from across the continent, many of whom went on to play leading roles in their respective countries.

The influence of multiple serialism is more difficult to trace than that of dodecaphony. Paz explored it in 1955, and it is certainly a reference point for later generations of composers. As mentioned above, it also played an, albeit apparently minor, role at CLAEM. It may therefore not come as a surprise that a CLAEM graduate, the Peruvian Mesías Maiguashca, would become the assistant of Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was most intimately associated with the technique, from 1968 to 1972. That said, the Mexican Julio Estrada, Stockhausen’s student in 1968 to 1969, also has to be mentioned in this context, even if, for Estrada, too, multiple serialism served more as a starting point. More often than not, the specificities of the technique are submerged in combinations with, variously, aleatory technique, music theatre, (live) electronics, experimentalism, microtonality, or spectralism, to form a generalised avant-gardism. In many cases, these techniques and principles were introduced in quick succession if not at the same time (the same can be said about dodecaphony in some instances), so that careful distinctions are often difficult to undertake. This is not to minimise, however, the pivotal role that serialism played in shaping modernist and avant-garde composition in Latin America.

Serialism in Asia went through a process of introduction, experiment, denouncement, concealment, integration, and expansion. The century’s turmoil – civil wars, the Second World War, and colossal political shifts – were not simply the backdrop against which the history of serialism in Asia unfolded but were integral to its trajectories. The rise and fall of political ideologies, colonial conditions, governmental constraints and reforms as well as social movements steered the course and determined how serialism could be integrated with the region’s distinctive musical aesthetics. Mobility – movement of people both transcontinental and intra-Asia – created interesting paths through which the concept of dodecaphony was circulated to and in Asia, itself a fascinating window on the history of modern music. After nearly a century of circulation, serialism has merged with different aesthetics of various Asian cultures and traditions in noteworthy ways.

China

The development of serial thinking in Chinese contemporary music spanned nearly a century. Although the process was marked by significant ruptures, it would eventually prosper, rising to become a prominent trend of contemporary composition between 1980 and 2000. Its prominence is, paradoxically, related to some extent to the cause of its rupture: a pursuit of doctrine and system of validation for musical composition and national identity. This complicated history can be divided into four periods.

Third Period: Prominence

First Twelve-Tone Compositions (1980–1990)

After the Cultural Revolution ended, universities and conservatories reopened in 1978. Music was one of the top pursuits, owing in part to the large number of youngsters participating in performing Model Opera. The number of applicants for the Central Conservatory of Music was more than 17,000. A significant political and economic reform swept through the country, and twelve-tone music was again possible, giving rise to two phases of development.

The post-Mao era’s introduction of twelve-tone technique constitutes the first phase. In 1979, Luo Zhongrong composed a twelve-tone setting of a poem from the Han Dynasty (206 bc–220 ad) for voice and piano, Picking Lotus Flowers at the Riverside. It was published in 1980 in the March issue of Musical Works, a periodical sponsored by the official Chinese Musicians’ Association showcasing newly composed works. A nod of approval promptly appeared in a leading Beijing-based journal: ‘Comrade Luo’s courageous move into the prohibited zone of twelve-tone music should be looked upon as a meaningful exploration’ (Reference CheongCheong 2016: 92). Recognised as the first twelve-tone composition in China, the work’s critical acclaim prompted many to revisit modern music and adopt dodecaphony. Significant works soon followed, including Chen Mingzhi’s Eight Piano Pieces (1982), which used the tone row from Luo’s Picking Lotus Flowers, Wang Xilin’s Symphonic Suite Impressions of Taihang Mountain (1982), and the Moscow-trained symphonist Zhu Jian’er’s First Symphony (1986). Between 1986 and 1999, Zhu composed ten symphonies, six of which use dodecaphonic practices. Prompted by the outpouring of interest, Sang Tong also published his atonal Night Scene in 1981. Many dodecaphonic works would appear in the next two decades, though these earliest works continued to be frequently discussed, analysed, and anthologised.

A pioneer work, Luo’s Picking Lotus Flowers has great musical and poetic appeal, admired to this day. Luo created a pentatonic sonority by excluding non-pentatonic intervals in successive intervals of the tone row, which is saturated with several pentatonic subsets. Luo’s mastery of the subtlety of classic twelve-tone technique is clear. As shown in Figure 17.1a, the tone row contains two orderings of the pentatonic collection related in a palindrome, a design connected to the row’s inversional hexachordal combinatoriality. As the brackets show in Figure 17.1b, the partitions of the tone row yield successions of perfect fifths and fourths articulated in the low register, recalling similar surface details in the bass motion of the opening of Schoenberg’s Fourth String Quartet. The trichord partitioning in b. 8 foreshadows Luo’s future interest in trichordal derived series. Only the quintuplet of demisemiquaver notes in b. 3 provides a quick glimpse of surface pentatonicism. Through skilful unfolding of the aggregate, pentatonic subsets of different rhythms, durations, and densities resonate with one another in a mood of serenity, befitting the poetic expression. A fresh sounding piece is infused with a familiar pentatonic quality. In subsequent works, Luo’s serial thinking continued to evolve with sophisticated derived series and pentatonic designs. Chinese instruments are also incorporated, such as in The Faint Fragrance for zheng and orchestra (1989) and Tune of the Qin for guqin and Western ensemble (1993), the latter of which uses several famous guqin tunes, such as ‘Mist over River’ (Xiao Xiang Shui Yun). Luo’s serial thinking draws from both Hindemith and the Second Viennese School. It would have an indelible influence on the harmonic thinking of his pupils even if they did not adopt serialism, as in the case of Chen Qigang, who navigates through pentatonic space with aggregate completions (Reference RaoRao 2002).

Figures 17.1a and b Luo Zhongrong’s tone row and Picking Lotus Flowers, bb.

1–8

Following normalisation with the United States in 1979, China’s modern music took a significant English turn. Alexander Goehr’s lectures at the Central Conservatory of Music in 1980 brought a survey, including serialism, for hundreds of students and faculty. This and other visits such as Dieter Acker in 1983 breathed new life into the contemporary scene and had immense influence on the first generation of post-Mao composers seeking new expressive languages. Tan Dun noted, ‘Many professors came, including Goehr, George Crumb, and Takemitsu, and the ’78 class became so hungry, absorbing all kinds of music. But at the same time buried deeply in our own bodies and minds, there is something very special, which is a very earthy and revolutionary kind of feeling’ (‘Composers Tan Dun and Chen Qigang discuss their membership in the Class of 1978’ 2009). Many of the new-wave composers in the class of 1978 explored serial practices, amongst them Guo Wenjing, in his violin concerto Tune of Earth (1986–7), Xu Shuya, in his Violin Concerto (1982), Chen Yi, in her piano solo Duo Ye (1984), and Tan Dun, in his string quartet Feng Ya Song (1982). Tan’s string quartet won international recognition with a Dresden Award but also sparked heated debate in People’s Music about whether the twelve-tone technique was adequate for expressing a Chinese sensibility (Reference ChangChang 1991).

Standing on the ruins of the Cultural Revolution, these composers’ pursuit of modern music spoke of hope for a new expression. The anti-modern political agenda continued to cast a shadow on the scene, though not enough to stop the new tide. Some teachers such as Luo embraced serialism; others did not but nevertheless shielded young composers’ modernist endeavours from criticism. In this climate, the twelve-tone technique quickly stood out as a tangible method among the multitude of styles. As theorist Zhang Wei poignantly notes, ‘the most astonishing phenomenon is that during this time, almost all Chinese composers, regardless of their ages, gender, and ethnicity, tried their hands at composing with twelve-tone technique’. As a result, composers’ individual and personal versions of what they understood to be twelve-tone music gave rise to the important development of home-grown systems of composition. It is estimated that by 1986 there were nearly thirty works using the twelve-tone technique, including many large genres such as concertos, symphonic poems, and film music (Reference ZhangZhang 2017: 25). The method is used by many primarily as a thematic resource.

Theory Texts and Composition Systems (1990–2000)

A proliferation of articles and books intensified the spread of serialism in the second phase of its development. Neither performances nor recordings of dodecaphonic or serial works were accessible owing to the lack of libraries and concerts of modern music; composers learned primarily from theory texts. Particularly crucial were the translations of theory books and articles from North America, most notably Allen Forte’s Structure of Atonal Music (1973). Introduced to China as early as 1982, the Chinese translation was published in 1986. George Perle’s Serial Composition and Atonality and Twelve-Tone Tonality were also published in Chinese translation by 1982, though they had less impact. Scholarly work in this area grew quickly: eighty-nine essays on serialism alone were published between 1980 and 1990, along with many more general articles (Reference WuWu 2010: 7).

Zheng Yinglie, Professor of Music at Wuhan Conservatory, was influential in the dissemination of dodecaphony. He began teaching twelve-tone techniques in 1981, and his book, Fundamentals of Serial Music Composition, was published in 1989 (Reference ZhengZheng 2007). He also authored the first English article on serialism in Chinese music (Reference ZhengZheng 1990). Based roughly on Reginald Brindle’s Serial Composition (1986), the book presents a systematic approach to serial technique, listing eight types of serialism: melodic, tonal, atonal, inversional, pentatonic, motivic, all-interval, and derived. Written as a composition manual, Zheng delineates a set of composing principles and analyses canonic twelve-tone works by Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. Although the first Chinese book on serialism, it already draws on many Chinese twelve-tone compositions as examples. The book’s influence spanned the next three decades, and Zheng’s home institution, Wuhan Conservatory, became a powerhouse for the pursuit of serialism, attracting scholars, composers, and students. Chen Yi recalled obtaining a class-note version of Zheng’s book after a conference for young composers held in Wuhan in 1985. Meanwhile, more pedagogical books on serial works were published in which Babbitt’s work was introduced (Reference WangWang 1991).

New composition systems also emerged, reflecting efforts to infuse serialism with Chinese principles. ‘Taiji Composition System’ was created in 1987 by Zhao Xiaosheng (1945–), a student of Sang Tong, developing a correlation between pitch and the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching, while incorporating the traditional genre, Tang Daqu, as a formal design (Reference ZhaoZhao 1990). The system received critical acclaim and analytical attention, though it was not widely adopted. Other systems of serialism proliferated, with distinctive features such as Wuxing philosophy, a nine-tone scale, and Chinese modal symmetry among others. Serial techniques were adapted in numerous ways, representing different sinicising efforts to express Chinese aesthetics. This trend stems from a long-held obsession about Chinese sensibility in new music. It was perhaps believed that, with a rationale, serialism could offer the search for Chinese sensibility a systematic answer.

Japan

Serialism left limited traces in Japanese contemporary music. However, Japan had a key role in the initial dissemination of dodecaphony in Asia due to its early and systematic approach to Westernisation. The notion of ‘modernism’ in Japan constitutes a historical and artistic epoch starting in the late nineteenth century. Founded in 1887, Tokyo Music School (later Tokyo University of the Arts) was instrumental in the teaching of Western music, which began by establishing exchanges with Germany. Between 1875 and 1914, the Japanese Education Ministry sent 632 students (in all subjects) to Germany, the highest number from any country and almost twice as many as the second highest, Britain (330) (Reference Takenaka, Cho, Roberts and SpangTakenaka 2016: 24). Subsequently, the Japanese musical world became organised according to German aesthetics. The flow of music cultural exchange grew after the First World War. For example, Kiyoshi Nobutoki studied composition in Berlin between 1920 and 1922 and returned to Japan to become a leading figure for the next two decades. Kōsaku Yamada and Saburō Moroi also studied in Berlin and then returned to prominent careers in Japan. Mobility of Japanese students ensured abundant information in Japan about recent modern music in Europe. While the Japanese curriculum remained focused on the German Classic-Romantic canon, works by Scriabin, Bartok, and Stravinsky were also introduced, performed, and studied. Japan’s first music critic, Motoo Ōtaguro, a highly educated music enthusiast who studied in London, was extraordinarily influential, publishing nine books and three translations in the short period between 1915 and 1920. His writings, while for the general public, earned admiration from trained musicians for his sharp capture of the Zeitgeist (Reference Ogawa and MoriOgawa and Mori 1988: 91). Many journals were also founded by composers for discussions of Western music theory, aesthetics, and related subjects, and books on technical aspects of music proliferated.

As early as the 1910s, articles on Schoenberg and his scores appeared in magazines and books. Schoenberg’s name was introduced to Japan by Ōtaguro, first in a brief passage in From Bach to Schoenberg (1915), then in After Debussy (1920). The latter includes a Japanese translation of ‘Schoenberg and Beyond’ from the Musical Quarterly, an English article originally written in German by Egon Wellesz, Schoenberg’s first private pupil, and translated into English by American scholar Otto Kinkeldey. Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre was translated in 1929. Subsequent books on new music, including a forty-four-page biography of Schoenberg (1933) by Hiroshi Koizumi published in a book series on the world’s contemporary musicians, covered both Schoenberg’s atonality and his twelve-tone technique. Composers adopted the method in various manners; for example, Shūkichi Mitsukuri incorporated a twelve-tone method compatible with the pentatonic system (Reference Yang, Janz and YangYang 2019: 260). Also helpful were sympathetic views towards atonal music such as those of former Mahler pupil, Pringsheim, who worked as a composer/pedagogue and later as conductor of the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. Pringsheim placed atonality firmly in the trajectory of German tradition (Reference KatayamaKatayama 2007).

In the interwar era, several large series of musical scores introducing contemporary music were published, creating a climate for diverse expressions. However, as the military adventurism of the Japanese empire grew and the government gained complete authority to outlaw any form of dissent, composers began to toe the political line more carefully. After Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the Nanking massacre in 1937, effectively initiating the Second World War in the Pacific, militaristic nationalism took over. Publishers came under the control of the government, who monopolised paper distribution and censored content. Music composition became part of the all-nation support system for the totalitarian government and imperial expansion. The end of the Second World War in 1945 precipitated a political, economic, and cultural transformation leading to changes in the styles, idioms, techniques, and ideologies of concert music in Japan.

Two forces, separated by the Second World War, were responsible for the roots of twelve-tone music in Japan. The first force appeared in the 1930s. Scores and information about dodecaphony began to be made available. For example, the 1931 publication of a series of contemporary piano music in Gesammelte Werke der Weltmusik included Schoenberg’s work. The journal Ongaku Kenkyū [Music Research] released a special issue in 1937 devoted to Schoenberg (Reference EtheridgeEtheridge 2014: 60). Composers took notice. Isotarō Sugata (1907–52), a student of Nobutoki, also studied with Pringsheim and developed an interest in Schoenberg. Even the nationalist Nobutoki was said to have privately studied Schoenberg’s scores and loaned the scores to Moroi, who himself connected the twelve-tone technique to folk song in an attempt to develop an abstract theory of music (Chōko Seiji, quoted in Reference Janz, Janz and YangJanz 2019: 295). Moroi’s students would go on to form important post-war trends of composition in 1946 as a part of the group named Shinseikai [Group of New Voices].

During the war, composers either were silent or undertook modernist pursuits clandestinely. Sugata did not write in a style derived from Schoenberg until 1946, when he composed a string quartet and an orchestral piece, Picasso’s Picture (Reference KatayamaKatayama 2007). An interesting example was Kunihiko Hashimoto (1904–49), who was introduced to Berg during his studies in Vienna between 1934 and 1937, then travelled to Los Angeles to study with Schoenberg. According to his famous student Toshirō Mayuzumi, Hashimoto secretly made a prototype of his later approach to twelve-tone technique during the war.

The second force in Japanese serialism started after the close of the war, when the nationalist ideology no longer ruled and censorship was lifted. During the period of American occupation and even beyond, an atmosphere of free exploration was supported by new institutions such as the library of the American Cultural Center in Tokyo (Reference WadeWade 2014: 62–4). There were three prominent groups critical to the post-war development of serialism. The most important of these was Shinseikai, a group of academic composers formed in 1946 by Moroi’s students, Minao Shibata and Yoshirō Irino. Another pupil, Kunio Toda, chanced upon René Leibowitz’s Schoenberg et son école (1947) while being detained at the end of the war in Indochina. He brought the book back to Japan in 1948 and joined Shinseikai, with whom he began to pursue dodecaphony seriously. Shibata and Irino became key exponents in Japan, and Shinseikai constituted the leading group of serialists for the following decade (Reference DeguchiDeguchi 2019: 304).

Irino’s Concerto da Camera for Seven Instruments (1951) is recognised as the first Japanese twelve-tone work. Later, he also serialised rhythm. As a proponent of dodecaphony, Irino wrote an introductory book on twelve-tone music in 1953, authored many introductory journal articles, and made Japanese translations of Josef Rufer’s Die Komposition mit Zwölf Tönen (1952) as well as several other texts, including Leibowitz’s book in 1965 (Reference SawabeSawabe 1992: 37–9; Reference GallianoGalliano 2002: 174). He would continue to refine his twelve-tone technique, while incorporating Japanese instruments in distinctive ways, as in Ongaku for two kotos (1957). He founded the Institute of Twentieth-Century Music, which later sponsored Japan’s version of Darmstadt. Shibata’s dodecaphony work in mid-century includes Asa no uta [Morning Song] (1962), which uses existing series from Berg’s cantata Der Wein, a practice he continued for several more works. He later turned to aleatory, electronic, and other avant-garde approaches. Associated with this group was also Makoto Moroi, son of Saburō. In 1953, he won two international awards for his twelve-tone works: Partita for Flute (1952) won a prize awarded by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and Composition No. 1 (1951–3) was awarded seventh prize in the Queen Elizabeth Competition. He would be credited with introducing audiences to works of serialism and aleatory music.

Meanwhile, a generation of self-taught composers committed to Japanese and Western fusion became interested in serialism as well. They were formerly members of the New Composer League founded in 1930, which was interrupted by the war and, in 1946, reconstituted as the Japanese Society for Contemporary Music (later becoming a branch of ISCM), led by Yoritsune Matsudaira. The group also included Hashimoto, Jōji Yuasa, and Fumio Hayasaka. Matsudaira composed and wrote actively in his youth but went silent during wartime. His style shifted from impressionism to neoclassicism, then to serialism with extended influence of gagaku. In 1952 he won an ISCM prize at Salzburg with Theme and Variations for Piano and Orchestra (1951) based on a popular gagaku tune, Etenraku, whose expressive constraints and neutral quality resonated with him. Its third variation employs serial techniques, where three twelve-tone rows are derived from intervallic relationships found in Etenraku (Reference Matsudaira and BenítezMatsudaira and Benítez 1998). The first tone row is based on the first tetrachord of the ryūteki (flute) line of the Etenraku melody. Figure 17.2 shows (a) the Etenraku melody, (b) a derived series comprising the melody’s first tetrachord, its retrograde, and inversion, and (c) the piano opening of Variation III. In his later works, Matsudaira derives most of his tone rows from gagaku. Winning international prizes, he gained significant reception, first in Paris and Darmstadt, then elsewhere in Europe, making a strong impression. Matsudaira was one of the few composers who continued to develop his serial thinking after it was no longer in vogue in Japan.

Figures 17.2a, b, and c Gagaku melody, tone row, and Yoristsune Matsudaira, ‘Variations’, bb.

1–3

The third group is Jikken Kobo [Experimental Workshop], formed in 1951 by Yuasa, Mayuzumi, Hayasaka, and Tōru Takemitsu, as well as artists, poets, and performers. It was a young group exploring many different media and new languages of which serialism was only one. Between 1953 and 1954, they studied intensely works of Schoenberg and Webern. At the Sogetsu Art Centre, concerts began in 1958, and a contemporary concert series was established in 1960 to feature a wide spectrum of artistic voices, involving many leading composers of the post-war art music scenes. Yuasa’s work Projection for Seven Players (1955/56) is a study of twelve-tone technique, whose structure also demonstrates an elaboration of the music of Japanese Noh drama. As issues of temporality, space, and existentialism were central to Yuasa’s work, he sometimes used serialised rhythm to achieve certain temporal effects, though not consistently, and he later abandoned serialism (Reference GallianoGalliano 2018: 15–33). Similarly, while Takemitsu’s distinctive style does not cohere with any monolithic idea of serialism, he also briefly engaged with dodecaphonic approaches, especially Webernian ones, from the end of the 1950s to the early 1960s. It coincided with the period of composing Requiem for Strings (1957), the work that famously caught Stravinsky’s attention during his trip to Tokyo in 1959; his high praise brought Takemitsu widespread recognition. The work employed several of Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition, demonstrating a close attention to pitch organisation. His dodecaphonic or partial-serial works include Le Son Calligraphié I, III (1958, 1960), Maque (1959), Pause Interrompue (1952–60), Piano Distance (1961), Ring (1961), Sacrifice (1962), and Hika (1966) (Reference DeguchiDeguchi 2019: 318; Reference BurtBurt 2006: 50–82). The use of retrograde and inversion – a reversal of musical succession – commonly seen in these works has lasting influence on his oeuvre in his use of mirrors and palindromes (Reference BurtBurt 2006: 56–8). The 1960s also brought a visit from John Cage and David Tudor in 1962, and the advent of experimentalism and radical avant-gardism.

Serialism quickly declined in Japan, however: Yoritsune Matsudaira’s work would receive more performances in Europe than in Japan. Composers born after the Second World War also studied serialism overseas. The most prominent among them is Toshio Hosokawa, who studied in Berlin with Isang Yun, then in Freiburg with Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough. While schooled in advanced serialism, Hosokawa remained deeply enculturated in the unique instrumental timbre of Japanese music, such as the different types of flute including nohkan in the music of the Noh theatre, kagurabue, komabue, and ryūteki in gagaku, as well as the various genres surrounding the music of the shakuhachi such as the slow, free-rhythm honkyoku. In his Vertical Song I for flute (1995), serialism is combined with a large number of extended techniques in a search for new sonorities. He notes, ‘I often utilized new playing techniques because I was interested in the meaning they had in the realm of modern music – the creation of tones which have an alien effect and the discovery of new instrumental sounds which hadn’t existed before’ (Reference HosokawaHosokawa 1995).

Korea

Korea endured significant foreign interventions and changes of ruling regimes in the twentieth century, which shaped its development of serialism. As part of its modernisation process in the late nineteenth century, Korea accepted Protestant Christianity as its religion of all classes. Western music such as bands and hymns were introduced by US missionaries. Numerous anthologies of hymns with Korean lyrics were published, and hymn singing was actively practised and appropriated by Koreans in the pursuit of ‘Christian modernity’ (Reference ChoiChoi 2009: 10–11). In 1910, following the first Sino-Japanese war, Korea became a colony of Japan. The end of the Second World War in 1945 marked the restoration of freedom for Korea, though it also led to the intervention of the US military. Following the debilitating Korean War (1950–3), the division of the country into communist North and capitalist South resulted in their separate development and prolonged American involvement in South Korean society.

Under Japan’s colonisation, Korea’s Indigenous music was suppressed, and Austrian-German music and hymns with Japanese texts were used to indoctrinate the colonised in the Japanese empire. Korean composers underwent schooling with a Western music curriculum and advanced their study in Japan and the United States, the first group of whom included Un-Yung La, who studied with Saburō Moroi in Japan. Songs became the most popular genre. After the Second World War, the first co-educational music college based on European models was established at Seoul National University (SNU) in 1946. Meanwhile, Indigenous music was given the name gugak [national music], which the National Gugak Center shaped into the canon of traditional music. In the post-war period, South Korean composers of Western music confronted, as post-colonial subjects, the dual challenge of regaining their cultural heritage and identity/-ies and continuing or even catching up with the most recent trends of Western music, namely the pursuit of musical modernism.

Owing to its colonial history, many mid-century Korean composers became interested in modern music via Japan. Sun-nam Kim, who studied in Tokyo between 1937 and 1943, was one of Korea’s first composers to use twelve-tone technique. His 1946 piano concerto exhibited stark atonality. After moving to North Korea in 1948, however, he faced the internal campaign against communists who came from South Korea. His work was censored, and he was sent to be a factory worker. In 1952, the Korean Society of Contemporary Music was established in Seoul; its founder was Un-Yung La, whose ‘Enigma’, the third of his Six Preludes for Piano, was premiered in 1955, Korea’s first twelve-tone piano piece. ‘Enigma’ received wide attention and was followed by more interest in atonality and serialism. La would continue to play an important role as a writer, pedagogue, and composer. In the late 1950s, desire to catch up with modern musical trends prompted composers to pursue their study of dodecaphony in Europe. Isang Yun and Nam-June Paik represented the first generation to follow this path.

Isang Yun was born into a traditional literati family. Like other musicians during colonisation, Yun went to Japan in the 1930s – first to Osaka and then Tokyo – where between 1940 and 1941 he studied with Paris-trained composer Tomojirō Ikenouchi. Returning to Korea, he joined the anti-Japanese resistance while teaching music, gaining a reputation as an avant-garde composer and founding the Association of Korean Composers. The Korean War that began in 1950 hampered creativity, but many continued to study modern techniques through books and scores from abroad. After the war, Yun taught at several Seoul universities, where he encountered a Japanese translation of Rufer’s book, which inspired him to study more advanced techniques in Europe. He first went to Paris (1956–7) and, at the end of 1957, to the Musikhochschule Berlin to study with Boris Blacher and Rufer himself. In 1958, he went to Darmstadt and encountered works of more recent serialists such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna, and Luigi Nono, as well as Cage and Matsudaira. The latter’s orchestral work U-mai (1957) became the catalyst for Yun’s own approach to serialism. His Music for Seven Instruments (1959) combines Schoenbergian serialism with Korean court music aesthetics and received critical acclaim at Darmstadt in 1959. He incorporated serialism with (unserialised) timbral characteristics of Korean instrumental ornamentation such as intense vibrato, trills, and coloratura. In his chamber work Loyang (1962) and the orchestral piece Réak (1966), he developed his distinctive serial style using the concept of a Hauptton [principal tone], as well as numerous ways of integrating Korean court music, folk music, philosophy, religion, and other cultural aspects of Korean tradition such as the Asian mouth organ (Reference KimKim 2012). On the score of Loyang, he noted the use of the ancient Chinese court music ‘Nagyangch’un’ [Spring in Loyang]. Yun settled in Europe after the success of his Buddhist oratorio Om mani padme hum in 1965. The work incorporates a serial melody alongside formal Buddhist chant, as well as echoes of crickets, running water, and wind chimes. However, in 1967 Yun was abducted by the government of Park Chung-Hee and transported to South Korea and sentenced to life on charges of espionage. It was part of the large international round-up orchestrated by South Korea’s Central Intelligence Agency. After appeals from the international community that included, amongst others, Stravinsky, Ligeti, and Stockhausen, he was released to hospitalisation in 1968 in Seoul and eventually returned to Germany in 1971. There he stayed and taught a generation of prominent Korean composers including Sukhi Kang, Byung-Dong Paik, and Chung-Gil Kim, as well as other Asian composers such as Toshio Hosokawa and Pan Huanglong. In South Korea, however, Yun’s continuing critique of the ruling regime remained a source of tension, and performances of his music were obstructed whenever less liberal administrations were in power (Reference ChangChang 2020).

Yun’s contemporary, Nam-June Paik, took quite a different route. Paik moved with his family to Hong Kong and then Japan, where he received a BA in Aesthetics from the University of Tokyo in 1956, with a thesis on Schoenberg. Intent on studying serialism, Paik, too, went to Germany. He attended Darmstadt at the same time as Yun, where he met Stockhausen and Cage. Almost immediately abandoning serialism, he was attracted by Cage’s works and ideas and became a member of the Fluxus movement by 1962, establishing himself as an experimentalist.

After the Vietnam War and the normalisation of relations with Japan, South Korea rose on the world stage. This status intensified its quest for a national identity, particularly in the 1970s, as the public slogan of the Park regime during this time was ‘Cultural Korea’, a marker of the country’s attempts to revive traditional culture. Composers had heated debates, which examined critically how Western music could serve as a vehicle for expressing and advancing Korean tradition and aesthetics. Meanwhile, the second generation of South Korean composers, many of whom studied at SNU, became more familiar with Western contemporary music through journals and community forums introducing serial, atonal, and electronic idioms and extreme avant-garde styles. Sukhi Kang was a leading figure. He visited Isang Yun regularly in 1968 during Yun’s incarceration in Seoul (Reference KangKang 1992). In 1969, he started the Pan Music Festival, on the Darmstadt model, in Seoul, which would become a crucial forum showcasing contemporary music. In 1970, upon Yun’s suggestion, both Kang and Byung-Dong Paik furthered their training in Germany, establishing a strong tie between Germany and South Korea. Kang met more contemporary composers, including Yuasa, and encountered new works of European modernists. He settled into studying engineering and music and developed a distinctive modern style. For example, in Nong for flute and piano (1970), Kang adopted serialism’s notion of chromaticism without an ordered tone row to depict traditional shamanic ritual dance, while also incorporating Korean traditional rhythmic patterns (changtan). Register, pitch contents, and dynamic markings also became closely controlled to express the haphazardness and volatility of the shamanic spirit (Reference LeeLee 2017). Kang returned to Korea in 1975 to teach at SNU but later divided his time between Korea and Germany, becoming a highly respected composer of his generation in both countries, with students including Junsang Bahk, Unsuk Chin, and Shinuh Lee (Reference BabcockBabcock 1995). In particular, Lee noted that Kang’s teaching, which emphasized the importance of balance and structure, was influential, and that she used total serialism as a tool to express herself (interview with Shinuh Lee, 22 December 2021).

Like Kang, Byung-Dong Paik was also influenced by his study with Yun to explore the combination of Asian philosophy with modern techniques. A SNU alumnus, he was also influenced by Sun-nam Kim’s twelve-tone work. Paik noted too that Moroi’s books on functional harmony and counterpoint were key texts for musicians in the 1950s (Reference LeeLee 2017: 257). His serialism is closely intertwined with his sense of national identity, which is expressed primarily through the use of melody (Reference KillickKillick 1992; Reference KimKim 1990). His Un/Rhythme series (1970) uses rhythmic grouping and grouping of melodic flurries that reflect his national identity, as well as retrograde structure. Pitch-class sets are also used, replacing the strict use of tone rows (Reference LeeLee 2017: 254–70). The score, which requires precise execution of the notation, often obscures a sense of pulse. Paik returned to South Korea in 1971 and spent his career almost exclusively in his homeland, partly because he considered his music best performed by Korean or Asian musicians. Another SNU alumna, Younghi Pagh-Paan, studied in Freiburg with Huber and Ferneyhough from 1974 to 1979, before establishing herself in Germany. Employing serial thinking, she adopted a more lyrical and ornamental treatment. In her well-received Ma-Nam I (1977), she devised a timeless flow, interleaving instruments which share a common lyrical thread. The instrumental timbres are supplemented by Korean ornamentation that creates a heterophonic texture within a monophonic structure (Reference HowardHoward 2006: 136).

The 1970s and 1980s saw modern music proliferate in Korea, as composers returned from their studies in Germany bringing a new ‘rationalism’ in the form of compositional technique and theory. Organisations such as Chang-ak-hoe (established in 1958) and the Korean division of the ISCM (established 1971), as well as the magazine Monthly Music, became important conduits for new music. In 1977, Chou Wen-chung gave a keynote speech at the Sixth International Arts Symposium, echoing Yun’s notion of the tone as ‘a musical entity in itself’ (Reference LeeLee 2017: 267–8). Across these decades, serialism was the most prominent approach.

The 1980s opened with one of the most violent civil uprisings in the modern history of Korea. With his assassination, President Park Chung-Hee’s twelve-year-long dictatorial regime came to a sudden end, and protests for democratic civil rights emerged throughout the country. According to musicologist Jung-Min Mina Lee, the underlying attitude was a general distrust of authority and the West, which was considered suspect owing to its support for the previous ruling regime. The situation led to the rise of a ‘Third Generation’, led by Lee Geon-Yong, which began to question the reliance on Western modernist idioms. Composers sought a fresh mode to express national identity, aiming at a creative transmission of traditional culture. Interests in serialism and Western modern idioms were replaced by newer aesthetics. Unsuk Chin, an alumna of SNU who also studied with Kang in the 1980s, received international attention before travelling to Hamburg to study with Ligeti. There, she would also abandon serialism, while further disavowing any nationalist intent or cultural connection to Korea, and instead embrace spectral and electronic techniques.

Conclusion

Asia had a long history of incorporating Western music into its society before dodecaphony was introduced. Conservatories and universities also had been established in the European music mould, with a strong focus on the German Classic-Romantic canon (Reference Everett, Everett and LauEverett 2004: 1–21). Thus, Asian composers’ foray into atonality and dodecaphony, which was considered an extension of the tradition, is unsurprising. Japan, as the first country in Asia to fully embrace Westernisation and itself a coloniser, played a major role in the initial dissemination of the concept. What might be considered separate introductions of dodecaphony in different countries were in fact connected to Japan through an active network of ideas, print media, and movement of people in the region, owing in no small part to Japan’s colonising history. Japanese music critic Ōtaguro’s prolific writings aided the circulation of the concept through translation into Chinese (Reference ŌtagaroŌtaguro 1931), and the publication of several comprehensive series of music scores focused on European contemporary music in Japan also popularised early atonal music in the region. Schoenberg’s portrait on a 1927 magazine cover in Beijing likely came via Japan. Moroi’s pupils pioneered dodecaphony in both Japan and Korea (Un-Yung La). The impact of Irino’s seminal texts such as the 1957 Japanese translation of Rufer’s Composition reached beyond his group Shinseikai in Japan to inspire Korean composers such as Yun.

Despite their shared resources, however, colonial histories, civil wars, political reforms, and imperial agendas determined whether or not (and when) composers had the liberty to explore dodecaphony. In the early 1940s, China was very close to developing dodecaphonic compositions, given Shanghai’s unique foreign territory and the refugee Second Viennese School musicians the cosmopolitan city attracted. Sang Tong’s Night Scene stands witness to aspiring atonal expression, and Luo Zhongrong’s success in 1980 could be deemed to have sprouted from an extraordinarily long germinating period of creative seeds sowed in the 1940s. Chinese composers at large were prohibited from ‘formalism’ after the establishment of the PRC in 1949, and their adoption of twelve-tone technique and serialism thirty years later coincided with the earnest effort to ‘catch up’ and ‘make up’ for the prolonged vacuum of contemporary music. The post-Mao introduction of dodecaphony was a late arrival, which explains the outpouring of creativity and strong interest surrounding serialism for two decades at the end of the century, and the enduring commitment to set theory (as a well-developed technique for analysing dodecaphony) well into the early part of the twenty-first century. From this perspective, the imprint of serialism on Chinese contemporary music, though delayed, is significant.

In sharp contrast, despite Japanese composers’ initial earnestness and enthusiasm for dodecaphony in the mid-century, both in composition and publication, it did not gain prominence, despite the continuing efforts of Matsudaira and Yuasa. Dodecaphony is now regarded as largely inconsequential to the history of Japanese contemporary music, where the so-called ‘Cage Shock’ cast a longer shadow and had significant influence. As a result, Japanese composers such as Hosokawa in the late 1970s learned serialism elsewhere, mainly from Yun in Germany, whose first exposure and breakthrough were, ironically, provided by Japanese composers (Reference WadeWade 2014: 75–6). Moreover, although newly decolonised mid-century Korean composers felt the urgent need to ‘catch up’ with modern compositional technique by pursuing dodecaphony, South Korea could be said to have established the steadiest and most continuous development of serialism in Asia (Reference LeeLee 2017: 6). Although encumbered by continuing warfare and political division, serialism in Korea has been pursued and employed thoughtfully to express traditional aesthetics by several generations of the country’s most prominent composers throughout their creative output. It has also contributed to the development of serialism beyond the region of East Asia. Most significantly, as a prominent composer in Germany, Isang Yun, in Berlin, together with colleagues in Freiburg, educated generations of Asian composers in advanced serial thinking.