Talk:Serialism

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Contents 1 The Listener 2 Article quality 3 Incompetent Alterations To This Page 4 Serialism vs twelve tone 5 Nono and Cage 6 Goeyvaerts and Messiaen 7 A great way to improve this article 8 relation to pointillism? 9 Questions 10 Citations 11 Lack of examples and specifics

[edit] The Listener

I think some attention should be given to how a listener perceives serial music. Information from the field of music cognition offers great insight into how serial music is interpreted by a listener. For example, labarotory tests conclude that professional musicians and non musicians alike do very poorly recognizing and remembering passages of serial music. The listener does not infer any large scale schemata of serial works according to such studies. This may be of benefit to the article.

[edit] Article quality

As someone who has devoted a good part of his life to understanding the compositional practice of a number of composers who can be described as practitioners of serialism, I just want to say (civilly) that two days ago we had an article that dealt with this difficult topic pretty well. I regret that the article which, for no discernible reason, has entirely replaced it - why did the writer think this was necessary? - does not (and I'm still being civil) do so nearly as well. The number of basic spelling and syntax errors in themselves require a rather large amount of labour to correct before we could even start on the content, and it looks like that would be labour spent in vain. A pity.

Cenedi

The previous page was well below the standards of wiki content - it was POV, personal essay, unorganized, contained unencyclopediac content, it did not cite sources, it adopted POV naming conventions. The behavior of the previous editor/editors has violated a raft of standards for wikiquette and wikistyle. The characterizations of the changes made are inaccurate, bordering on the mendacious. This article needs further work, including descriptions of techniques, works, performances and performance history and influence of serialism as a technique and as an idea. I object both to the abombinable quality of the article as it stood when I began working on it, and to the absolutely unacceptable personal actions of the previous editors. Stirling Newberry 00:17, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Incompetent Alterations To This Page

I am one of the two lecturing musicologists who have jointly spent dozens of hours over the past week or so (July 2005) carefully constructing a well-researched entry that, for the first time on this site, clearly and sensibly explains 'serialism'. I therefore wish to point out to users of this site that the sudden, summary deletion and alteration of much of our work in the large-scale edit by one 'Stirling Newberry' replaces our developing entry by something that is *utterly incompetent*, *misleading*, *woefully selective and incomplete*, *incorrect as to several matters of fact*, and *intermittently meaningless*. Users are advised to go back several stages through the 'edit history' to see something written by people who actually have a published track record of knowing what they are writing about. The fact that an amateur tonal composer is able to impose his misunderstandings over the heads of qualified professionals in the field is *a disgrace*. It also brings wikipedia into disrepute, and will only have the effect of discouraging competent authorities from assisting with the project.

Mark D.

Hello Mark; welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your work on the article. I need to mention a couple things: first, I would like to point out our civility policy, which actually helps editors of differing viewpoints get along, if followed carefully; and I need to point out that Wikipedia is a collaborative enterprise, and there just might be more than one expert in the room; and I need to point out that no one "owns" articles here: they constantly evolve, with input from people knowledgeable in the subject at hand. I can wave my Ph.D. and pound on the table too, but it probably won't help my case; indeed a reputation for arrogance is not a useful monkey to have on your back here. Looking at the content, at first blush, your version looks good to me, and Stirling's has its good points too. You need to go through point by point, on this talk page, and discuss it with him if you both want to work on the article. Vandalising the article with an angry note about "incompetence" is really not the right approach, but I welcome you to try again, the right way. Thank you for listening, Antandrus (talk) 02:52, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Try again?!? *No chance*. When I was revising the appalling mess that was there when I first arrived, I bent over backwards to try and incorporate *everything* that other people had written - adding careful and respectful qualifications and caveats where what they had written was incomplete, partisan or clueless. Yet I see this amateur whose efforts you seek to defend has simply *deleted* whole swathes of what I and my associate had revised and added - and replaced it with material which, in so far as it means anything at all, is at times so *wrong* as to make it and its writer a laughing stock.

I'm afraid you'll just have to manage without me and my friend: we have better things to do than provide fodder for egotistical amateurs who have no idea that they have no idea.

Mark D.

[edit] Serialism vs twelve tone

I've scribbled a bit about the problems of this subject before on Talk:Tone row, but I thought it best that I try to quickly explain the changes I just made here:

Serialism and twelve-note music are not strictly speaking the same thing. Twelve-note music is a subset of serialism, really. It doesn't make sense to speak of the two as the same, because you might have a serial piece which uses a scale with 41 notes to the octave and serialises them - such a piece is serial, but not twelve-note music in any sense. Likewise, you might have a piece that serialises dynamics, durations, accents and instrumentation, but not pitches - such a piece would also be serial, but not twelve-note music. This is a bit of a chewy problem, because the best known serial composers (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern) serialised only pitches, and so the two terms become confused. However, there's no question of somebody calling a totally serialised work like Pierre Boulez' Polyphonie X "twelve-note music" - it's serial, and that's all there is to it.

Here's a quote from the Harvard Dictionary of Music which I just copied from [1], which probably puts the problem better than I could:

"[serial music is] music constructed according to permutations of a group of elements placed in a certain order or series. These elements may include pitches, durations, or virtually any other musical values. Strictly speaking, serial music encompasses twelve-tone music as well as music employing other types of pitch series, ie., those containing fewer than twelve pitches (e.g., certain "pre-twelve-tone" movements from Schoenberg's Five Piano Pieces op. 23 and Serenade op. 24; Stravinsky's In Memoriam Dylan Thomas) and those containing more than twelve pitches (e.g., Messiaen's Quator pour la fin du temps). Normally, however, the term is reserved for music that extends classical Schoenbergian twelve-tone pitch techniques and, especially, applies serial control to other musical elements, such as duration. Such music, mainly developed after World War II (although there were also earlier tendencies in this direction, notably in the music of Berg and Cowell), is often distinguished from twelve-tone serialism as "integral" or "total" serialism. It is usually characterized by a high degree of precompositional planning and thus also of compositional determinacy.

OK, after all that, the other edits I made are quite simple: first, serial music is not always atonal - quite a lot of Berg's serial passages, for instance, are definitely in a certain key. Secondly, I don't think Stravinsky's Fanfare for a New Theatre is a good example of a serial composition: it's a pretty small piece for just two trumpets, which hardly ever gets heard. Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra is a far better known piece (as well as being an excellent example of what you can do with the twelve-note technique). --Camembert

OK, I've finally taken the plunge and moved the specifically 12-tone stuff (which was most of the article) to twelve-tone technique. Hopefully I'll be able to expand this article soon. --Camembert 19:33 Apr 21, 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Nono and Cage

Two quick notes/questions: 1. Did Luigi Nono develop serial principles really that independently? As far as I know he regularly attended to the "Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik" in Darmstadt, meeting there with Stockhausen and even Boulez. 2. It seems that John Cage (sic!) had some influence on the delopment of serialism. Unfortunately the only source I have for that right now is an interview with the musical historian Reinhold Brinkmann (Harvard) in German <URL: http://www.beckmesser.de/themen/brink/int.html>. Here is the relevant part of the interview with an English translation by me below:

"Unter musikgeschichtlichen Gesichtspunkten muss heute auch einer Figur wie John Cage zentrale Bedeutung für die Entwicklung im frühen Nachkriegseuropa beigemessen werden; nach dem kürzlich veröffentlichten Briefwechsel zwischen Cage und Boulez muss er als einer Väter der seriellen Musik betrachtet werden, denn er hat bestimmte kompositionstechnische Verfahren mit Boulez besprochen, die dann direkt in die serielle Technik eingegangen sind. Man müsste eigentlich die Musikgeschichte von dieser internationalen Perspektive aus neu schreiben."

"From the point of view of musical history one must realize that even a figure like John Cage had a central role in the development in the early post-war-Europe; following the recently published exchange of letters between Cage and Boule, he has to be acknowledged as being one of the fathers of serial music, because he discussed with Boulez certain aspects of composition technique which directly became part of serial technique. Actually the history of music would have to be rewritten from this international perspective [a perspective which takes the influence of American composers on musical development in post-war Europe into account; Utis]"

That said, I am not sure whether Brinkmann puts such an emphasis on it, just because he wants to make a point. Thus, I am not arguing for including it into the main article yet, not without further recherche/evidence. But I thought it might be worth mentioning here on the talk page.

-- Utis 01:19, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Goeyvaerts and Messiaen

This page needs to include Goeyvaerts.

That's Karel Goeyvaerts. Hyacinth 01:25, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

We lost the info, which justifies the external link, that he wrote the first serial piece. Hyacinth 21:50, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

I always thought the first serial piece was Messiaen's Mode de valeurs et d'intensités (1949)... David Sneek 09:03, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

"He composed the first serial composition, Nummer 2 (1951) for 13 instruments ([2])." Hyacinth 11:13, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Are you suggesting that 1951 came before 1949? David Sneek 10:38, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

No, I'm suggesting that Mode de valeurs et d'intensités isn't always considered serial. Do you have a source which considers it so? Hyacinth 11:06, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Sure. From Olivier Messiaen: "The results of these experiments were pieces such as Modes de valeurs et d'intensités for piano which have been described as the first works of total serialism." 1949: "Olivier Messiaen composed his Mode de valeurs et d'intensities (Mode of Durations and Intensities), a piano composition that 'established 'scales' not only of pitch but also of duration, loudness, and attack.'" [3] "In Structures, Boulez uses a series of 12 pitches borrowed from Messiaen's Mode de valeurs et d'intensite, a series of 12 durations (borrowed from the same source), a series of 12 attacks, and a series of 12 dynamics." [4] "...quand il fut question d'une extrapolation des principes de la série webernienne des hauteurs aux durées, attaques et intensités, Messiaen produisit en 1949 la pièce pour piano intitulée Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, oeuvre qui a immédiatement entraîné l'adhésion de Boulez et Stockhausen, et provoqué - qu'on le regrette ou non - la naissance du phénomène structural connu sous l'appellation de série généralisée." [5]. David Sneek 12:27, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Note that the article specifies "total". Hyacinth 12:42, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

So does our Messiaen article. David Sneek 12:45, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Its not surprising that Messiaen would willingly accept credit for such an important development, and thus I'm not sure if he is a reliable source here. Note that the article specifies "total", and that your second source indicates that Mode de valeurs et d'intensités only serialized pitches and durations and is thus not "total" serialism. Can there be "total" serialism? I don't know, and there is a slippery slope at the bottom of which we find a definition of the first twelve tone piece as the first serialist piece. Hyacinth 12:46, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

That said, I welcome you to contribute a description of this conflict to the article. Hyacinth 12:48, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Also, I now realize you weren't quoting Messiaen, but the article about him. Hyacinth 12:50, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

The second source only says that Boulez borrowed two of the series - the pitches and the durations - from the piece, but that does not contradict that attack and intensity were also serialized, as the other sources say. How many parameters before we can speak of "total" serialism? By the way, "Messiaen expressed annoyance that his work Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, seen by some as the first work of total serialism, was given such importance in his output." David Sneek 13:00, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

This is a great example of the clarification that is needed here. Mode de valeurs was based upon series of notes to which durations and intensities were attached, but those series were not all complete 12-tone sets. And the series were simply played out simultaneously, without modifying the order with any of the methods familar from Viennese 12-tone technique. So, it was serial but not 12-tone, and Messiaen always identified it as "modal". I think that it would be a great service to more clearly separate the "serial" concept from the "twelve-tone" methods of Hauer, Schoenberg, Webern, and then, later in this article, address the problem of the serialization of several parameters, whether through fixing durations and other parameters directly to pitches (as in Messiaen, Goeyvaerts, Boulez) or through a parallel system of operations, designed to project structural aspects of a single set (as in Babbitt), and then, finally, to discuss perceptual issues.

[edit] A great way to improve this article

Out of curiosity as to what kind of language "Eesti" was, I clicked it while I was reading this article. I was amazed to find numerous manuscript diagrams relating to serialism, which appear to have been drawn by composers themselves. Not being able to speak "Eesti" (which turns out to be Estonian), I would appreciate it if a speaker of Estonian translated some of the Estonian article, at least the parts with the diagrams. Or, if you don't speak it, have a look at the diagrams in the article in Estonian, it's pretty fascinating.

Much of that material looks copyright. If Estonia falls into the same copyright loophole as the bulk of the former Soviet Union, material from before 1970 or so is fair game, but the copyright laws of English-speaking countries would not permit the publication of these. CRCulver 00:47, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] relation to pointillism?

I can't find anything in Wikipedia about the musical style pointillism. Is that the same as what Wikipedia is calling Serialism? If so it should be mentioned in this article and there should be a pointer page. If it is different then pointillism should have a page too.

Lloyd

Usually when instrumental writing is called "pointillistic" it generally means that the writing consists of individual notes, not chords. CRCulver 21:33, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

"Pointillism" (more accurately, "punctualism") is, as you say, a musical texture or style, and is not the same thing as serialism, which is a technique of composition. However, most (not all) of the music described by the term was also created (between about 1950 and 1955) using serial techniques of one sort or another. This is doubtless why it is found in the Serialism article. An example of a non-serial punctual work is Messiaen's "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités" (1949). The term was originated probably by Herbert Eimert or Karlheinz Stockhausen, after discussion with other people working in Cologne around 1953, and so was originally a German term: "punktuelle Musik". German has a separate word for pointillism, "Pointillismus". In a certain sense, these are polar opposites, since in painting (e.g., Seurat) pointillism concerns densely packed dots (the closest musical equivalent is theTonschar or "swarm of notes" found in the so-called statistical textures of Stockhausen's music after 1954, or the "clouds" in Xenakis's music from around the same time). Punctual music, on the contrary, tends to sparse textures, though the definition usually involves the separate determination for each note of all of its various "parameters" (pitch, duration, dynamic, timbre, register, etc.). Jerome Kohl 00:04, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

FWIW, I have now added an article on Punctualism, and linked both to and from the Serialism article. I wonder if a redirect for "Pointillism (music)" and a disambiguation page should be created? --Jerome Kohl 02:11, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Questions

In the fifth paragraph of Basic Definition, the author states: "The most common requirement is that first half and second half of the row not be inversions of each other." However, this was most often not the case. Schoenberg and Webern, to name two composers, often deliberately constructed 12 tone rows such that the first and second hexachords were related by inversion, retrograde or both. In fact, in the seventh paragraph of 'Theory of Serial Music' the author states that: "An aggregate may be divided into subsets, and all the members of the aggregate not part of any one subset are said to be its complement. A subset is self-complementing if it contains half of the set and its complement is also a permutation of the original subset. This is most commonly seen with hexachords or 6 notes of a basic tone row. A hexachord which is self-complementing for a particular permutatition is referred to as prime combinatorial. A hexachord which is self complementing for all basic permutations – Inversion, Retrograde and Retrograde Inversion – is referred to as all-combinatorial. The concepts of combinatoriality were explored by Schoenberg and Webern, but were rigorously defined and explored in the work of Milton Babbitt."

[edit] Citations

Given the number of sources could we switch the citation style over to footnotes? Hyacinth 08:59, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Lack of examples and specifics

This article is in dire need of more specifics, and fewer vague generalities. I just read the whole thing, and I don't believe I saw a single specific piece of music mentioned. There is also not a single example written out in musical notation. The whole thing reads like one long "he said, she said."--75.83.140.254 01:52, 4 February 2007 (UTC)