Talk:Punctualism

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[edit] Punctualism?

I don't think I've ever heard what I know as (musical) pointillism described as 'punctualism'. I am from the UK - maybe the term is in common usage in other countries, I don't know. I would suggest, however, that this article be renamed 'Pointillism (Music)'. 90.205.92.47 (talk) 20:04, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

As the person who created this article, I take it to be my responsibility to defend my choice of term. It may be partly a matter of regional difference, though I do find examples from the UK, for example, in the New Grove article "Dynamics", by Matthias Thiemel, and in the second translation of Boulez's Relevés d'apprenti (as Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship translated by Stephen Walsh, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. 16–17 and again on 151). As a matter of fact, I think the term entered English usage with the first translation of this same book, by Herbert Weinstock, in 1968, and it is difficult when translating French (as opposed to German) to use the originally French term "pointillisme" to render "ponctuelle". As alluded to in the article, "pointillism" was the (mis)translation of the German "punktuelle Musik" used in the 1950s and 60s, and it is still used by some reputable writers today. However, in the last 25 years or so, many careful scholars have avoided this word because of the inappropriate associations with the painting technique used by Seurat. Not all have opted for "punctualism" (as, e.g., Michael Hicks did in his 1989 article on Berio's Nones) as an alternative to "pointillism", of course. For example, M. J. Grant, in her recent book, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-war Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2001), manages an entire chapter on "The Isolated Tone: Electronic and Serial Music, 1945–1954" without once using the term. Richard Toop has opted for "point music" in his 2001 New Grove article on Stockhausen and in his 2005 book, Six Lectures from the Stockhausen Courses Kürten 2002, and the article already mentions Edward Lippman's alternative. Markus Bandur, in Aesthetics of Total Serialism (Birkhauser, 2001) uses the original German term, with "pointillist music" in scare-quotes, in just one place (p. 42).

Turning to your proposal to retitle this article, this would actually amount to a new and much broader article, since the present topic actually involves only the two senses (a texture and a compositional technique) applicable to post-1945 European serialism, whereas the English usage of "pointillism" in connection with music dates back to 1897 (according to the OED) and has been applied (more appropriately) to the music of Debussy, Delius, and early Schoenberg, amongst others. It seems to me that the common description of Webern's orchestration of the six-voice Ricercar from Bach's Musical Offering as "pointillist" is also appropriate, in that it involves finely detailed, shifting coloration of the notes of recognizable objects, whereas the equally common application to the sparse and registrally separated textures of pieces like Webern's Piano Variations is not. Nevertheless, it was probably this Webern connection that facilitated in the 1950s the misuse of the French term "pointilliste" for the German "punktuelle".—Jerome Kohl (talk) 05:31, 4 January 2008 (UTC)