Material and History in the Aesthetics of 'Serielle Musik'

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. and Royal Musical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toJournal of the Royal Musical Association.

http://www.jstor.org

Material and History in the Aesthetics of 'Serielle Musik' Author(s): MARCUS ZAGORSKI Source: Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 134, No. 2 (2009), pp. 271-317Published by: on behalf of the Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Royal Musical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40783216Accessed: 05-03-2015 11:16 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of contentin a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 193.92.195.252 on Thu, 05 Mar 2015 11:16:46 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 134, no. 2, 271-317 '' ^l[^SLuP

Material and History in the Aesthetics of 'Serielle Musik'

MARCUS ZAGORSKI

An introduction to a practice of theory-formation must have as its object, first and foremost, the conditions of the material.1

A somewhat pained nostalgia hangs behind words such as these, proffered by the composer Helmut Lachenmann in 1978, for they express ideas found more commonly in writings that accompanied the beginnings of Serielle Musik' 25 years earlier.2 Theoretical reflection, inferred here to be essential to compositional work, is said to begin with reflection upon musical material - a material that issues demands,

Initial research for this article was made possible by grants from Stanford University and the Freie Universitt Berlin, and I am grateful to both institutions for their support. Stephen Hinton, Karol Berger, Thomas Grey and Hermann Danuser also deserve my thanks for their expert guidance during - and far beyond - my doctoral studies. More recently, Martin Iddon and Mie Spencer offered intelligent and challenging feedback on my ideas about the post-war period, and Paul Everett encouraged my writing by reducing my teaching load. Finally, the anonymous reviewers for JRMA provided insightful comments that enabled me to improve this article considerably. 'Eine Einfhrung in eine Praxis der Theoriebildung mu zuallererst die Bedingungen des Materials zum Gegenstand haben.' Helmut Lachenmann, 'Bedingungen des Materials: Stichworte zur Praxis der Theoriebildung', Musik als existentielle Erfahrung: Schriften 1966-1995 ', ed. Josef Husler (Wiesbaden, 1996), 35-53 (p. 35). Translations are my own unless noted otherwise. My use of the term 'serielle Musik' implies primarily German practice and follows the specific German meaning of the term, which refers exclusively to compositional techniques, developed in the 1950s and 60s, that consciously distinguished themselves from Schoenbergian dodecaphony by extending the structural principle of a pitch row to other elements such as duration, intensity and timbre. In English (as in French), 'serial music' ('musique srielle') is often used much more generally to refer to any music that uses the serial principle, regardless of whether this principle is applied only to pitch, as in the music of Arnold Schoenberg, or universally. The more general application of the term preserves the original meaning of 'musique srielle', which was used initially by Ren Leibowitz in 1947 in writings on the 12-note method of Schoenberg and his students. As the concept of serial music was later adopted by Pierre Boulez (who had studied with Leibowitz) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (who befriended Boulez) in the early 1950s, it was adapted to refer also to the structuring of compositional elements other than pitch. The German concept of 'serielle Musik' became widely established shortly thereafter, largely through the publication of the journal die Reihe: Information ber serielle Musik , to which Stockhausen and Boulez were significant contributors. For more on this point,

ISSN 0269-0403 print/ISSN 1471-6933 online The Royal Musical Association DOI: 10.1080/02690400903109083 http://www.informaworld.com


272 MARCUS ZAGORSKI

or 'conditions', that guide a composer's hand. The 'conditions of the material' ('Bedingungen des Materials') were invoked similarly by Karlheinz Stockhausen in the early 1950s, in essays he wrote concurrently with influential compositions employing serial techniques, such as his Kontra-Punkte and the early Klavierstcke (works the composer honoured by designating them as the first numbers of his oeuvre).3 And the formulation echoes Theodor W. Adorno's theory of a 'tendency of the material' ('Tendenz des Materials'), which was widely discussed in the years following the publication of Philosophie der neuen Musik in 1949. In fact, musical material was so widely discussed by theorists and composers in the 1950s and 60s that Carl Dahlhaus characterized these years as an era of Materialdenken, an era in which ideas about material dominated theoretical discourse.5

It may seem banal to state that composers thought and wrote about musical material, but theories of material in this period represented more than mere shop talk: they expressed prescriptive and proscriptive aesthetic positions, which were shaded with ethical overtones and provided a means for the assertion of agency. Appeals to the 'conditions' or 'tendency' of material masked subjective preferences with objective imperatives, and legitimized compositional decisions with the higher authority of laws to be obeyed and historical directives to be followed. Citing such laws and directives lent world-historical weight to what has been seen as a paradigm shift in music around 1950, in which a new musical style, thought to be representative of a new world and dissociable from a politically compromised past, was championed as an older, neoclassical style was vilified. The decree of the

see Christoph von Blumrder, 'Serielle Musik', Terminologie der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, Handwrterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, Sonderband 1 (Stuttgart, 1995), 396-411. 3 In his 'Arbeitsbericht 1952/53', for example, Stockhausen called for a compositional approach that was 'materialgerecht' or 'appropriate for the material', and this approach was described as an 'agreement of the laws of form with the conditions of the material

' (bereinstimmung der Formgesetze mit

den Bedingungen des Materials'). Karlheinz Stockhausen, 'Arbeitsbericht 1952/53: Orientierung', Texte, ed. Dieter Schnebel, 6 vols. (Cologne, 1963-89), i: Zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik (1963), 32-8 (p. 32). The concept of material was one of the most essential elements in Adorno's philosophy of music. As noted later in this article, it made its first appearance in his reviews and essays of the late 1 920s; it was developed significantly in the following decades and remained central through to his final writings. See, for example, Carl Dahlhaus, 'Abkehr vom Materialdenken?', Algorithmus, Klang Natur: Abkehr vom Materialdenken?, ed. Friedrich Hommel, Darmstdter Beitrge zur neuen Musik, 19 (Mainz, 1984), 45-55. This essay also gives one perspective on the changes in compositional thinking that took place in the 1970s in Europe. An English translation appears as 'A Rejection of Material Thinking?', Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge, 1987), 274-87. Some or the many studies or the shirt around l^OU include Anne hrerrler, tin neues mia der Musik": Der Paradigmenwechsel nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg', Klassizistische Moderne: Eine Begleitpublikation zur Konzertreihe im Rahmen der Veranstaltungen '10 Jahre Paul Sacher Stifung, ed. Felix Mayer (Winterthur, 1996), 187-97; Im Zenit der Moderne: Die Internationalen Ferienkurse fr


MATERIAL AND HISTORY 273

material surfaced, for example, in Pierre Boulez's cry for progress entitled 'Schoenberg is Dead', which appeared in the same year (1952) as that locus classicus of early serial composition, his Structure la for two pianos. While the stylistic and technical origins of this music have been traced to a group of students working with Olivier Messiaen in the early 1950s,7 the historical, philosophical and even sociological justifications of the music - that which lent style and technique the force of ethical injunctions - were rooted elsewhere, in claims about material. These claims did not fade as the earliest, highly rigorous serial methods were quickly superseded by new compositional techniques. Rather, ideas about material, and the perceived need for the ongoing discovery of new compositional materials, were thought to link a tremendous variety of creative paths that were explored in Europe over the ensuing decade.

The diversity of approaches to serial composition, and the even greater diversity of subsequent developments from and reactions against the method, make it difficult to generalize about 'serial' and 'post-serial' music.8 But similar ideas about material and history were shared by otherwise dissimilar composers, and these ideas were thought to connect post-serial works to serial works such that the music of the 1 960s was seen to follow from the music of the 1950s in a way that went beyond mere temporal succession. This connecting thread was identified, if not critiqued, in 1963 by the composer Gottfried Michael Koenig. Looking back over the preceding ten years he recalled that, with respect to musical material, 'in the beginning, one's attention was focused on pitches, durations, intensities and timbres. Then other qualities or issues became pressing: groups, which consisted of many notes; spatially conceived sound events; new musical instruments or new ways of playing old ones; liberties given to

Neue Musik Darmstadt 1946-1966, ed. Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser, 4 vols. (Freiburg, 1997); Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1995), v: The Late Twentieth Century -; and Morag Josephine Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe (Cambridge, 2001). For more on the stylistic and technical roots of early serialism see Richard Toop, 'Messiaen/ Goeyvaerts, Fano/Stockhausen, Boulez', Perspectives of New Music, 13 (1974), 141-69. Other significant influences on Boulez's work are examined in Thomas Bsche, 'Auf der Suche nach dem Unbekannten oder Zur Deuxime Sonate (1946-1948) von Pierre Boulez und der Frage nach der seriellen Musik', Die Anfange der seriellen Musik, ed. Orm Finnendahl, Kontexte: Beitrge zur zeitgenssischen Musik, 1 (Berlin, 1999), 37-96. 8 The lack of nuance in the designations 'serial' and 'post-serial' is considered at greater length in Gianmario Borio, Musikalische Avantgarde um 1960: Entwurf einer Theorie der informellen Musik (Laaber, 1993), 23-33. In his sketch of a music history of the 1960s, Ulrich Siegele argued that the music of the 1960s is sketched in the music of the 1950s - and indeed in a much more profound way than as merely postulated historical continuity' ('die Musik der sechziger Jahre ist entworfen in der Musik der fnfziger Jahre, und zwar in einem prgnanteren Sinn als dem blo postulierter historischer Kontinuitt'); 'Entwurf einer Musikgeschichte der sechziger Jahre', Die Musik der sechziger Jahre , ed. Rudolf Stephan, Verffentlichungen des Instituts fr Neue Musik und Musikerziehung, 12 (Mainz, 1972), 9-25 (p. 11); quoted in Borio, Musikalische Avantgarde , 31.


274 MARCUS ZAGORSKI

performers; musical action.'10 In each of these approaches something new was designated as material and thereby brought under compositional control. Such new materials could be seen and heard in pieces from the period: ordered series of pitches, durations, intensities and timbres constituted the material of a piece such as Boulez's Structure la; Stockhausen's Klavierstck I (1952) used groups of many notes, while his Gesang der Jnglinge (1955-6) and Gruppen for three orchestras (1955-7) were concerned with the spatial differentiation of sound events; new performance techniques were applied to the old instruments of Mauricio Kagel's Musik fr Renaissance-Instrumente (1964-5); and, finally, the deliberate composition of performance choices and musical action constituted the basis of Dieter Schnebel's Glossolalie (1959-60), as well as pieces by Boulez, Stockhausen and Kagel, among others.

These examples obviously share little in terms of compositional technique. Furthermore, significant technical differences exist between pieces written at the same time by different composers (one might compare Boulez and Stockhausen in the early 1950s, for example), as well as between pieces written at different times by the same composer (one might compare Structure la with Le marteau sans matre, written only a few years later). But such differences have no bearing upon how these works are said here to be related. In fact, it is precisely the differences that draw the connecting thread Koenig identified: the seemingly deterministic progressive unfolding of new materials reflected a shared conception of history that was constructed at the time, and the ongoing drive to move beyond the past and push music forward was felt by composers with very different approaches - including those thought to be most critical of the initial rigours of serialism.

Philosophy of history and Materialdenken In an essay some contemporaneous readers interpreted as 'the epitome of an anti- serialist manifesto',11 Gyrgy Ligeti sketched an outline of the historical development of musical form that was characteristic of thinking in the period. Published in 1960 in the journal die Reihe, Ligeti's text, 'Wandlungen der musikalischen Form', presented a picture of history actually very similar to that used to legitimize early

10 'Zu Anfang richtete sich das Augenmark auf Tonhhen, Dauern, Intensitten und Klangfarben, dann wurden andere Eigenschaften oder Gegenstnde akut. Gruppen, zu denen mehrere Tne zusammentreten knnen, Raumrichtungen, neue Musikinstrumente oder neue Spielweisen auf alten, die Spielfreiheiten des Interpreten, die musikalische Aktion.' Gottfried Michael Koenig, 'Das musikalische Material: Ein Begriff und seine Fragwrdigkeit', sthetische Praxis: Texte zur Musik, 2 vols. (Saarbrcken, 1992), ii, 143-53 (p. 149). The essay was originally delivered as a radio lecture and broadcast on Bayerischer Rundfunk Mnchen. 11 'Fr manche Leser galt sie [Ligeti's 'Bestandsaufnahme', or stocktaking] als Manifest der Antiserialitt schlechthin, fr andere als vorurteilsvolle traditionalistisch orientierte Zeitdiagnose.' Borio, Musikalische Avantgarde ; 33.



serialism (and even earlier dodecaphony); but it also lent itself, as will be seen, to attempts to legitimize subsequent compositional developments. According to Ligeti,

After Schoenberg had found a rule-based method for ordering free atonality, the serial principle, which was first applied only to the dimension of pitch, strove for expansion to the totality of form. This led to the discrete quantification of all parameters, through which such music became the result of overlapping prefabricated arrangements; accordingly, musical structure assumed the character of the 'pointillistic'. But only shortly after durations, intensities and timbres had been serially organized, the expansion of this method sought to cover more global categories, such as relationships between [different] registers and densities, and distributions of types of movement and structure, as well as the proportioning of the entire course of form. This, however, gave rise to significant shirts in compositional planning: with the serial control of more comprehensive formal categories, the structuring of the basic parameters gradually loosened; the rigid fixing of parameters became less important for the compositional whole. This again changed the state of form considerably: 'pointillistic' form enlarged to 'statistic-field- governed' form.12

The changes Ligeti outlined in prose are better appreciated in conjunction with musical examples representative of the stages in his conception of progress, examples that will be familiar to most readers. Example 1 gives the prime form (P-0) of Schoenberg's first completely 12-note composition, the Suite for Piano, op. 25, along with the opening bars of its fourth movement, the Intermezzo. The spatial layout of these opening bars is clearly modelled on tonal music, and Schoenberg has taken great care to distinguish the individual parts that make up the texture. The subsidiary, repetitive accompaniment figure in the right hand is made of two parts differentiated by articulation and pitch placement: the vertical minor ninth (e '-/")> stemmed upward, is staccato throughout, while the horizontal, descending diminished fifth (dV'-g), stemmed downward, is bound by a slur followed by staccato. In contrast to this, the primary voices, labelled espressivo, that make up the

'Die solcherart installierte chromatische Republik bedurfte aber ihrer eigenen gesetzlichen Ordnung. Nachdem Schnberg sie gefunden hatte, strebte das zunchst nur fr die Dimension der Tonhhen aufgestellte serielle Prinzip zur Ausbreitung auf die Totalitt der Form. Dies leitete zu jener diskreten Quantifizierung aller Parameter, durch die solche Musik zum Produkt aus berschneidungen prfabrizierter Anordnungen wurde; so nahm die musikalische Struktur den Charakter des "Punktuellen" an. Kaum waren jedoch Zeitdauern, Intensittsgrade und Klangfarben seriell organisiert, suchte die Expansion dieser Methode globalere Kategorien zu umfassen, wie Register- und Dichteverhltnisse, Verteilungen von Bewegungs- und Strukturtypen, zugleich auch Proportionierung des gesamten Formablaufes. Damit entstanden aber betrchtliche Verschiebungen in der kompositorischen Planung: mit serieller Steuerung umfassender Formkategorien lockerte sich Schritt fr Schritt die Einordnung der elementaren Parameter; ihre strenge Festsetzung wurde eher zweitrangig fr die Gesamtkomposition; dies wiederum verndert den Habitus der Form erheblich: das "Punktuelle" erweiterte sich zum "Statistisch-Feldmigen".' Gyrgy Ligeti, 'Wandlungen der musikalischen Form', die Reihe, 7 (1960), 5-17 (p. 5).


276 MARCUS ZAGORSKI

Example 1. Arnold Schoenberg, Suite for Piano , op. 25, prime form (P-0); bars 1-2 of the Intermezzo.

| * u ^ i,. |F* n, # " "* *"

(J=40) poco rit. _ _ _

pp ^

duet in the left hand have individual dynamic profiles; these parts are further distinguished from the accompaniment by their metrical placement and legato articulation. Schoenberg used pitch to reinforce the coherence of the whole: the 12- note set is divided into three tetrachords, the first of which is repeated in the two parts of the accompaniment, while the second and third unfold respectively in the upper and lower voices of the duet. A gradual tempo change brings the musical idea to a close.

Schoenberg himself wrote that he developed his new technique as a rule-based method for ordering free atonality, and in his essay 'Composition with Twelve Tones' he described the new language as a necessary historical development dictated by the laws of nature.13 Apparently obeying similar laws, the serial principle, Ligeti claimed, then 'strove for expansion to the totality of form', which led to the 'discrete quantification of all parameters' seen in Example 2. In this example, the prime form of the series used in Boulez's Structure la shows the serial principle applied to duration, intensity (loudness) and timbre (articulation) in addition to pitch: these four series together were used to generate the music. At the time he composed Structure la, Boulez believed such an expansion of the serial principle followed from the pitch material he used and was, he thought, a logical consequence of history.14

The opening bars of the resulting composition are shown in Example 3. Analytical comments on this passage are given later in this article; immediately apparent, in

13 The row forms of Schoenberg' s Suite for Piano , op. 25, and a discussion of the genesis of the 12-note method appear in Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America (New York, 1991), 187-200. See also Arnold Schoenberg, 'Composition with Twelve Tones', Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley, CA, 1975), 214-26. 14 See Pierre Boulez, 'Schoenberg is Dead', Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, trans. Stephen Walsh (Oxford, 1991), 209-14. Boulez's Structure la, and his ideas about history, are discussed at greater length below.



Example 2. Pierre Boulez, Structure la, series in prime form.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

f" q > ,.- tn > i|- *^

p p p' p fp ? p" r rp rp rp" r quasi quasi

#PKP PPP PP P P rnp mf f f ff fff ffff > . . A normal P. y . > - - ^

comparison to the Schoenberg example, is the difference in the textural conception of the music: the Boulez example has no clear hierarchy of parts, no distinction between the primary and subsidiary, between melody and accompaniment. To speak of melody and accompaniment at all seems misguided, for the texture is characterized by a scattering of 'points' across sound-space. The less dynamic (in fact, purposefully static) musical environment of these seven bars is effected by the obliteration of any sense of metre, the lack of registrai focus, and the unchanging loudness and articulation within each instrument.

The final form mentioned by Ligeti resulted from what he believed was a further expansion of serial organization, which 'sought to cover more global categories' such that the control of individual parameters was loosened and 'pointillistic' form enlarged to 'statistic-field-governed' form. Stockhausen had used what he called 'statistical' or 'collective' form in pieces composed in the mid-1950s such as Gesang der Jnglinge , Gruppen and Zeitmae. Such formal processes are characterized by shifts between textures in which individual elements are subsumed within a larger sound-complex and textures in which individual elements emerge and can be perceived as independent entities - shifts, in other words, between groups and points (in contrast to the mere points of 'pointillistic' music).15 Figure 1 is an excerpt from Zeitmae for five woodwinds (1955-6) in which, beginning at bar 29, individual instruments break away from the global tempo they had in common and adopt their own individual tempos. According to Stockhausen (who had a knack for aping scientific language), the instruments thereby create a sound-complex in which 'statistical criteria' become definitive owing to the complexity of relationships between the individual parts.16

In the excerpt from Ligeti's essay quoted above, history is endowed with agency and, apparently, guided by a higher purpose: the serial principle, he claimed, 'strove for expansion' ('strebte zur Ausbreitung') to the totality of form; the expansion of the

For this conception of 'statistical form' see Karlheinz Stockhausen, 'Erfindung und Entdeckung: Ein Beitrag zur Form-Genese', Texte, ed. Schnebel, i, 222-37. For a more comprehensive examination of Stockhausen's use of the word 'statistic' see Pascal Decroupet, 'Stockhausen: Statistik und Form, 1957', Im Zenit der Moderne, ed. Borio and Danuser, ii, 219-23. Stockhausen, 'Erfindung und Entdeckung', 235.


278 MARCUS ZAGORSKI

Example 3. Pierre Boulez, Structure la, bars 1-7.

Trs modr (J> = 120)

ifol fBf

I "pT'r V I" f Piano I fBf . . V legato sempre fcjjt ^v .

Trs modr (^=120) ^ ^ "^^^


J'2 Lautstrke dem Engl. Horn angleichen bis () ^4^^__7^.

-^Qs ^5-^U A /A J^

e/^N 3/"~' 4 5- "7* S ' >~~fe-~l rS--'' - ' - . p~-- 7

ff / ~

ff =

^so schnell wie mglich

ff~ !S==' mf^=^=Z -

" ff schnell- verlangsamen

r, 112 | 4 1 ^ 5- Y^L

J" . 112 3 4 7^_ ^ | ^T?-^7

so langsam wie mglich (J ) x^t^^ 3"^ ~

^^^FFuifE ?,-^=i r f JT1 & .tiii.. { =__ j -* SB, - ?,-^=i ^Njgg^^

M " ~P mf- ^ -=====::=:^

langsam- ^ beschleunigen 7-

fJ ^112 1

280 MARCUS ZAGORSKI

serial principle then 'sought' ('suchte') to cover more global categories. Much like the 'laws of nature' Schoenberg imagined, history functioned for Ligeti as the authority directing developments in musical form (and, as will be seen, musical material). There is more than one paradox at play here. Bestowing agency upon history could be read as an attempt by the individual (or a group of individuals sharing similar interests) to assert agency over history.17 But to advance his agency in this case, the individual created a system, a conception of the structure of history, that robbed individuals (including himself) of agency: Ligeti, like Schoenberg, believed he had no choice but to compose the music that was demanded by history; the serial principle seemingly 'strove for expansion' of its own accord.

The categories from and to which the serial principle was expanded - from basic parameters such as pitch, duration, intensity and timbre to more global categories related to the entire course of form - were synonymous with the term 'material' in the 1950s. The process of expansion described by Ligeti could be understood, therefore, as the expansion of material, and this narrative underpinned the historical, aesthetic and technical esprit - or better yet, Geist - of serial and post-serial music. Extreme consequences of this tendency are manifest in, to mention only one example, the works of Dieter Schnebel, a composer ever sensitive to the state of Geist. Schnebel represents a particularly significant case because he is seen, by some at least, as a sharp critic of serialism and the prevailing attitudes of the period. In the most recent edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, for example, he is praised for his 'aggressive willingness to dismantle cultural assumptions'.18 Considered against the evidence of his writings, such an assessment seems, at best, naive.

In his 1964 essay 'Das musikalische Material - Verhltnisse und Aktionen', Schnebel adopted a conception of history nearly identical to Ligeti's and, true to the spirit of the age, endeavoured to continue where Ligeti had left off. Schnebel reframed this history, however, by emphasizing the development of musical material rather than form. Defined as the 'raw materials [Rohstoffe], so to speak, with which composers work',19 musical material, according to Schnebel, advanced in tandem with significant stages of compositional history. Like Ligeti, he cited two crucial stages in the history of serialism as essential precursors to his own work: the first stage

17 Speculation about why an individual may have felt compelled to assert agency in this way touches upon psychological motivations about which I am not qualified to speak. Richard Taruskin does not shy away from such questions in The Oxford History of Western Music, v. Other related factors will emerge in the course of the present article. 18 See Paul Attinello, 'Schnebel, Dieter', The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 29 vols. (London, 2001), xxii, 551; idem, 'Schnebel, Dieter', Grove Music Online, , ed. Laura Macy, accessed 12 February 2009. 19 'Also bestnde das musikalische Material aus Elementen, gewissermaen Rohstoffe, mit denen die Komponisten arbeiten.' Dieter Schnebel, 'Das musikalische Material: Verhltnisse und Aktionen', Denkbare Musik: Schriften 1952-1972, ed. Hans Rudolf Zeller (Cologne, 1972), 286-8 (p. 286).


MATERIAL AND HISTORY 28 1

occurred with early serial technique as composers applied the principle to duration, intensity and timbre (in addition to pitch) and freed themselves from the use of themes and motives; in the second stage composers defined 'statistical relations' between notes and noises, used masses of sound as material, and began to introduce events that were 'foreign' to music (such as, he noted, the sawing of wood in a composition by Krzysztof Penderecki and the breaking of a bottle in one of Ligeti's pieces). Taking what seems to be the next logical step, Schnebel claimed that if 'sounds of all types' were the materials used by composers, then 'on the other hand, also that which is immaterial, such as relationships, connections and constellations, could become material'. A composer, he concluded, composes not only sounds, 'he composes relationships and actions' - the 'Verhltnisse und Aktionen' of the essay's title - too.21

Such materials, 'sounds of all types' and 'relationships and actions', were used in Schnebel's Glossolalie 61, which is a notated realization of his Glossolalie project of 1959-60. Because the original project had no conventional score, but instead a 'catalogue of materials - what the composer referred to as "material preparations" - which [were] to be assembled and interpreted by the performers',22 it invited, and required, subsequent more conventionally notated realizations. Schnebel's own realization of 1961 was dedicated, perhaps in hopeful deference to its material, to Adorno. The composition is scored for three or four vocalists, three or four instrumentalists, and one conductor. The vocalists read not from a poetic text, but from what is said to be language itself, such that 'the musical material [ . . .] has been subjected to enormous expansion: all acoustic and verbal events of past and current world affairs can be part of the content of Glossolalie'. The singers, for example, may be instructed to recite simultaneously the content of different text boxes containing seemingly random collections of words, names and phrases in different languages - the sounding result of which would seem to do justice to the title of the composition. In addition to these 'sounds of all types', the compositional material includes 'relationships and actions' determined by the composer. These can be seen in Figure 2, the opening of the piece, in which the conductor (Dj), vocalists (Si, S2, S3) and

20 'Halten wir nochmals fest: Klnge aller Art wren also das Material, mit dem die Komponisten bauen [...]. Andererseits knnte auch Immaterielles, nmlich Beziehungen, Zusammenhnge, Konstellationen, zum Material werden.' Ibid. 'Er komponiert Verhltnisse und Aktionen.' Ibid., 288. 'Es handelt sich nicht um eine Partitur im gewhnlichen Sinne, sondern um einen Katalog von Materialien - "Materialprparationen" wie der Autor es nennt - , die dann von den Ausfhrenden zusammengestellt und interpretiert werden sollen.' Borio, Musikalische Avantgarde , 109. Borio discusses Schnebel's work in the context of a larger consideration of informal composition and Adorno's concept of musique informelle. See ibid., 111. 'Das musikalische Material ist in diesem Schlsselwerk des informellen Komponierens einer ungeheuren Erweiterung unterworfen worden: alle akustischen und verbalen Ereignisse des vergangenen und aktuellen Weltgeschehens gehren virtuell zum Inhalt der Glossolalie' Ibid., 114.


282 MARCUS ZAGORSKI

instrumentalists (Ij, I2, 13) are instructed to walk onto the stage and take their places, with vocalist 2 walking forward to the apron of the stage and conveying the appearance of wanting to deliver an introduction. Indications of vocal character ('Im Tone eines Kommentators'), tempo {ziemlich rasch) and dynamic (mf) are given along with the text the vocalist is to deliver: 'A brief introduction! As you know, the music in question is for speakers and instrumentalists.' The text continues in the next system, with more frequent changes of tempo and loudness and the indication to turn to the pianist ('S2 dreht sich I2 zu') in preparation for that performer's musical entry.

The philosophy of history Schnebel utilized to legitimate his work was shared by many serial and post-serial composers in Europe. But the theatricality and seemingly unconventional palette of sound materials in Glossolalie 61 were also inspired by a force rather less widely tolerated: John Cage.25 Consider, by way of comparison, Luigi Nono's position on these issues: in 1958, Nono claimed that an 'absolute historical and logical continuity of development prevails between the beginnings of 12-note music and its current state', citing as evidence stages of historical development identical to those found in the writings of Ligeti and Schnebel (and, it will be seen, Boulez and Stockhausen);26 but just as resolute was Nono's turn against the welcome that greeted Cage in Darmstadt that same year.27 Schnebel, however, was smitten. He conceived Glossolalie as an example of 'process composition', which he believed was one of the most important ideas Cage had introduced to Europe.28 Cage himself, despite the wisdom of the day (and the morrow), was hardly outside the high-modernist mainstream. In fact, like Schoenberg and all the post-war composers examined in the present article, 'Cage was a self-appointed Hegelian protagonist on whom History made demands. He

For an insightful reading of Cage s reception in Europe, and specifically in Darmstadt, see Martin Iddon, 'Gained in Translation: Words about Cage in Late 1950s Germany', Contemporary Music Review, 26 (2007), 89-104. A broader study of Cage reception can be found in Amy C. Beai, New Musky New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley, CA, 2006). 26 'Zwischen den Anfngen der Zwlftonmusik und ihrem heutigen Stand herrscht absolute historische und logische Kontinuitt der Entwicklung'; see Luigi Nono, 'Die Entwicklung der Reihentechnik', Texte: Studien zu seiner Musik, ed. Jrg Stenzl (Zurich, 1975), 21-33 (p. 21). For a brief account see Pascal Decroupet, 'Nono: Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik heute, 1959', Im Zenit der Moderne, ed. Borio and Danuser, ii, 259-61. For Nono's own position see Luigi Nono, 'Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik von heute', Texte, ed. Stenzl, 34-40. In this latter essay, Nono's Hegelian Geschichtsphilosophie seems even more pronounced: the 'only' proper activity of a responsible composer is described as a mutually penetrating recognition of matter through spirit and the knowledge of spirit through matter ('es gibt nur eine Mglichkeit: nmlich das bewute, verantwortungsvolle Erkennen der Materie durch den Geist und die in gegenseitiger Durchdringung erlangte Erkenntnis des Geistes durch die Materie'; p. 37). For Schnebel's comments on the influence of Cage, see Dieter Schnebel, Die Tradition des Fortschritts und der Fortschritt der Tradition: Ein Erfahrungsbericht', Anschlge - Ausschlge: Texte zur Neuen Musik (Munich, 1993), 1 14-27 (pp. 1 17-19). Also relevant is Dieter Schnebel, 'Sichtbare Musik', ibid., 262-300, which includes a discussion of Glossolalie 61.



Introduktion

Xscizt- dt votjtsek**th. Plitz* ein . 4h sttvt stj, . S2 ht'tt kor 4* 4* X**fe, m* "** ** h/i:^r,Hj yb*H _

Jh Toho e**ej KoM***M-*ort

|osta*nSfeeine klne EiMfUrMw^! UU Sit. wm*, KawcI.U onc les excutants a^seitt en partie, en tant qi/ irtlrumenfiif^ se.scrVe' d^nshumetk. On fou- par exanipl. Au p^Mo

I Cosi oli esecutori aaiscono in part- come. strumcnKif

284 MARCUS ZAGORSKI

and to credit him with an 'aggressive willingness to dismantle cultural assumptions' seems either naively hopeful or poorly informed. By consciously appropriating new materials for an old philosophy of history, Schnebel reinforced the prevailing structure of (historical) power, and gave himself a place at the top of that structure.

The historical role fulfilled by the concept of material in this period was seen by Dahlhaus (who had learnt to regard it with critical distance by the 1980s) as a characteristic o Materialdenken. 'Looking back at the 1950s', he wrote in 1982, 'it might [ . . .] be necessary to ask if the interpretation of serial music as the fulfillment of a kind of non-subjective, objective historical "tendency of the material" ["Tendenz des Materials"] was in fact quite as convincing as it seemed at the time, not only to the commentators but also to the protagonists of compositional history.' Conscious of the legacy of Adorno's theory, to which he made explicit reference in the phrase 'Tendenz des Materials', Dahlhaus was at pains to stress that 'where a diktat of the material seemed to point the way that composers had to go [ . . .] a subjectivity was in fact at work which did not disappear by hiding behind the faade of "historical necessity'".31

The process of expanding the concept of material played itself out in what was described by Dahlhaus as a problem-history of composition, which directed the 'objective' historical tendency a composer may have felt compelled to obey. The problem with Schoenbergian dodecaphony, according to some serial composers, was that the serial principle had been applied only to pitch, and this resulted in a lack of consistency in the overall structure of the composition; the solution was to expand the serial principle to other so-called 'parameters' - other materials - of music such as duration, loudness and timbre. But this solution created, it was thought, new problems: significant structural relationships were not necessarily grasped by listeners, and unintended relationships could be implied; furthermore, composers relinquished their ability to shape musical events. To solve these problems without surrendering the desire for consistency within a composition, the serial principle was expanded to include larger structural events, such as relationships between tempos, registers, densities and collections of pitches (what Ligeti referred to, using Stockhausen's terminology, as 'statistic-field-governed' form), and the serial principle's application at the 'basic parameter' level was loosened. In this historical model, individual compositions functioned as solutions to problems and surrendered their status as timeless aesthetic objects; they were analogous to reports about the state of material tendencies at a particular stage in the history of composition. This problem-history of composition unfolded simultaneously with the expansion of

30 Dahlhaus, 'A Rejection of Material Thinking?', 275; 'Abkehr vom Materialdenken?', 46. Dahlhaus, 'A Rejection of Material Thinking?', 276. 32 That compositions functioned as 'reports' about the then-current state of composition is noted in Hermann Danuser, Die Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, 7 (Laaber, 1984), 295.



material; both were expressions of the same historical idea. They ensured not only that history would continue to advance, but also that composers could justify their own progress by pointing to solutions they had found and new material they had incorporated. In an effort to escape the past, composers moved forward by searching for material that was considered free from unsavoury historical associations (such as the tonal forms used by Schoenberg), and this led to a conception of new material as that given by nature ('discovered' and integrated by the composer) rather than passed down by history.

The expansion of material and the related problem-history of composition corresponded to an aesthetics of experimentation, discussed below in greater detail, which for Dahlhaus was 'nothing less than the fundamental aesthetic paradigm of serial and post-serial music'. Dahlhaus's choice of the word 'paradigm' draws a parallel between the historical construction that was used to legitimize post-war serialism and the historical construction of 'normal science' outlined in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?5 In Kuhn's theory of the history of science, a condition of 'normal science' prevails after a paradigm shift: within the shared premisses of a new paradigm, researchers work to solve problems, the solutions of which reveal more problems, so that new solutions are sought and the process continues indefinitely - or continues, rather, until the tenets of the existing paradigm are significantly challenged by a different paradigm. A similar series of problems and solutions underlay the philosophy of history that characterized the era of Materialdenken, which was an era also characterized by the expanding 'discovery' of new acoustic phenomena, an interest in musical complexity, and an engagement with the aesthetic theory of Adorno.36

Adorno and the truth of history The influence of Adorno's ideas increased significantly following the publication of Philosophie der neuen Musik in 1949, and his presence was also established through

As I have argued elsewhere, this search for a non-historical materia prima was, ironically, partly the result of misreading Adorno, for whom musical material is inescapably historical. See Marcus Zagorski, '"Nach dem Weltuntergang": Adorno's Engagement with Postwar Music', Journal of Musicology, 22 (2005), 680-701. 3 'Der Begriff des Experiments, als Gegenbegriff zu dem des Werkes, sei nichts Geringeres als das fundamentale sthetische Paradigma der seriellen und postseriellen Musik gewesen.' Carl Dahlhaus, 'Die Krise des Experiments', Komponieren heute, Verffentlichungen des Instituts fr Neue Musik und Musikerziehung, 23 (Mainz, 1983), 80-94 (p. 84). See Dahlhaus, 'Die Krise des Experiments', for the most extensive discussion of these ideas. What Dahlhaus neglects to mention is that the parallel ends where Kuhn recognizes the fictional, constructed nature of such paradigms; post-war serial composers, on the other hand, seemed to believe that the narrative under which they worked was an objective truth. See also Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3rd edn, Chicago, IL, 1996). These characteristics of Materialdenken are outlined in Dahlhaus, 'Die Krise des Experiments', 82.


286 MARCUS ZAGORSKI

his frequent participation in the summer courses for new music held in Darmstadt. The book's impact can hardly be exaggerated: it informed critical sensibilities and even guided the subsequent history of composition.37 The historical character of musical material is central to the argument of Philosophie der neuen Musik, and this theme triggered the widespread theoretical engagement with material in the 1950s and beyond.38 Adorno himself considered this book as, he later wrote, 'definitive for everything that I wrote about music thereafter', and he was very much conscious of and unapologetic about the philosophy of history he used to support his arguments. Responding in 1950 to a critical review of the book, he acknowledged:

I have applied a concept of 'objective spirit' [einen Begriff des 'objektiven Geistes'] to music, although without making it explicit: an 'objective spirit' which prevails over the heads of the individual artists and also beyond the merits of the individual works. This concept is as foreign to public awareness today as it is taken for granted in my own

40 experience.

37 Stephen Hinton, 'Adorno's Philosophy of Music', Encyclopedia of Aesthetics , ed. Michael Kelly, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1998), i, 25-9 (p. 26). This influence extended also to literature, for Adorno shared the Schoenberg essay of Philosophie der neuen Musik with Thomas Mann while the two were living in California during the Second World War. Mann, who was writing Doktor Faustus at the time, appropriated (one might say plagiarized, as Mann was well aware and subsequently downplayed) significant portions of Adorno's essay for the novel, and he solicited the music philosopher's expertise for the characterization of Adrian Leverkiihn. In a careful study of this collaboration, Mann scholar Michael Maar notes: 'Adorno more or less invented Leverkiihn's creations, note for note, leaving the author with nothing to do but transpose them into supple prose. In addition, Adorno lent Doctor Faustus an intellectual cachet - through his philosophy of music, which was inseparable from the scores themselves - that Mann alone would never have been able to achieve.' See Michael Maar, Teddy and Tommy: The Masks of Doctor Faustui, New Left Review, 20 (March/ April 2003), 1 13- 30 (p. 124). For more on this point see Gianmario Borio, 'Die Positionen Adornos zur musikalischen Avantgarde zwischen 1954 und 1966', Adorno in seinen musikalischen Schriften, ed. Brunhilde Sonntag, Musik im Diskurs, 2 (Regensburg, 1987), 163-79. The appeal of such ideas extended well beyond the borders of Germany and, as Giselher Schubert has noted, was great enough for many non-German composers to express a desire to learn the author's mother tongue; see Giselher Schubert, 'Adornos Auseinandersetzung mit der Zwlftontechnik Schnbergs', Archiv fr Musikwissenschaft, 46 (1989), 235-54 (p. 254). Detailed accounts of Adorno's reception can be found in Borio, 'Die Positionen Adornos', and Zagorski, '"Nach dem Weltuntergang'". 39 'Die Philosophie der neuen Musik [ . . .] war verbindlich fr alles, was ich danach irgend ber Musik schrieb.' Theodor W. Adorno, 'Wissenschaftliche Erfahrungen in Amerika', Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1997), x: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, 702-38 (p. 719). 40 Adorno's original article appeared under the title 'Miverstndnisse', Melos, 17 (1950), 75-7, and is reprinted in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tiedemann, xii: Philosophie der neuen Musik, 203-6; this translation is taken from Max Paddison, Adorno s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge, 1993), 270-1.



Philosophie der neuen Musik is a text Adorno expressly claimed should be understood as a 'detailed excursus to Dialektik der Aufklrung,

l a book he co-authored with Max Horkheimer, which argues that the enlightenment process, in which humans endeavour to liberate themselves from the forces of nature, has given rise to a new force that impedes the realization of liberation. The dialectic that characterized this philosophy of history is said, in Philosophie der neuen Musik, to be objectified in the very material of music: specifically, a material example of this social history can be seen in Schoenberg' s 12-note method, which was portrayed not as a mere compositional technique, but as a historical obligation.

2 Adorno's designation of this method of pitch organization specifically as 'material' followed from his long-standing desire, nurtured initially while working as a music critic in the late 1920s, to attack Stravinsky's neoclassicism as illegitimate and promote the music of Schoenberg. In an unpublished essay from 1928, which gives insight into this underlying motivation, Adorno oudined what he hoped to achieve through the work he was about to begin for the journal Anbruch:

Whereas Anbruch vests its polemical faade, so to speak, with the fight against the declared reaction (that is to say, against the remnants of the New German and the post- Brahmsian school) [...], the journal has much more difficult and serious polemical tasks at its core. Its real enemy, which it has to pursue with the most severe attentiveness, is the predominant and seemingly current reaction that was initiated by Stravinsky in the guise of neoclassicism, and which is represented in Germany today by Hindemith.

In order to carry out his task, Adorno first had to overcome a problem: both Stravinsky and Schoenberg were employing traditional forms in their works at that time. The solution he found, perhaps inspired by a philosophical pairing at least as old as Aristotle, was to turn from form to material.44 This decisive turn led to what would

'Das Buch mchte als ein ausgefhrter Exkurs zur Dialektik der Aufklrung genommen werden.' Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tiedemann, xii, 11. 2 For more on Adorno's changing assessment of 12-note technique see Martin Hufner, Adorno und die Zwlftontechnik (Regensburg, 1996). The circumstances that may have motivated Adorno's initial engagement with the technique are considered in Schubert, 'Adornos Auseinandersetzung'. 'Whrend der Anbruch mit dem Kampf gegen die deklarierte Reaktion, d. h. gegen die Reste der neudeutschen und der nach-Brahmsischen Schule, gewissermaen seine polemische Fassade ausstattet [...], hat er im Inneren weit schwierigere und ernstere polemische Aufgaben. Sein eigentlicher Feind, den er mit aller ernsten Aufmerksamkeit zu verfolgen hat, ist die gehobene und scheinbar aktuelle Reaktion, wie sie als neuer Klassizismus von Strawinsky inauguriert wurde und heute in Deutschland von Hindemith reprsentativ vertreten wird.' Theodor W. Adorno, 'Zum Anbruch', Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tiedemann, xix: Musikalische Schriften, 6, 595-604 (p. 598). The Greek term X)kr' (hyle, or 'matter'), from which our modern word 'material' descended, acquired philosophical significance with Aristotle's characteristically thorough treatment of the concept, but the term had been in use colloquially at least since the time of Homer. In Aristotle's writings, vXr' is transformed from a colloquial expression to a key philosophical term with elaborate theoretical import. The earliest fully developed examples of ')Xr' appear in the Physics and refer to 'that from which something comes to be'. Understood in this sense, vXr' functions ontologically


288 MARCUS ZAGORSKI

later become some of Adorno's most famous, or infamous, formulations about the 'Tendenz des Materials' (tendency of the material') and 'Stand des Materials' ('state of the material') 5 - ideas that encapsulate the historical essence of his concept of material.

First appearing in Adorno's writings as early as 1927, 6 the term 'material' acquired

explicit historical content in his brief report on Kurt Weill's Dreigroschenoper from 1 928, in which the critic noted the regressive aspects of a music that does not 'draw any consequences from the current state of musical material'.

7 But it is with the 1929 essay 'Zur Zwlftontechnik', published in the journal Anbruch, that Adorno presented a thorough critical argument that rested upon the association of musical material with a philosophy of history.

8 Following this 'turn' in 'Zur Zwlftontechnik', Adorno argued

that the 12-note method should be understood as a material embodiment of the variation principle, the signs of which could be traced through the music of Beethoven, Wagner and Brahms. Material was seen to reflect an objective historical process (similar to the Hegelian objektiver Geist), and a composer's decision to work only with material corresponding to the present state of history determined the rank of the composer. As such, material became for Adorno the 'arena [Schauplatz] of progress in art'.

because it refers to the essence of a thing. But more importantly, ')Xr' has epistemological significance in Aristotle's philosophy because of its relation to form (eia). If ')Xr' is the underlying substance of a thing, it is only the form of this substance that allows us to know it as a thing. Therefore UT|, though it can be said to exist independently, can only be known by the form it takes. Matter and form have been coupled ever since. For more on these points see 'Materie', Historisches Wrterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Grnder, 13 vols. (Basel, 1980), v, 870-924; also see Aristotle's Physics I, 9, 192a 31, and Metaphysics I, 2, 983b 6-18, both in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York, 1941). Schubert, 'Adornos Auseinandersetzung', 240. See, for example, Theodor W. Adorno, 'Schnberg: Serenade, op. 24', Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tiedemann, xviii: Musikalische Schrifien, 5, 331-4, and 'Schnberg: Fnf Orchesterstcke, op. 16', ibid., 335^4.

47 'Die nicht aus dem aktuellen Stande des musikalischen Materials die Konsequenzen zieht'. The original review is reprinted ibid., xix, 136-8. This translation is taken from Hinton, 'Adorno's Philosophy of Music', 26. Paddison notes the influence of Schoenberg's Harmonielehre and Ernst Bloch's Geist der Utopie, both of which (although Bloch was surely parroting Schoenberg) conceive the usability of compositional material as something historically determined. He also compares, convincingly, examples from Schoenberg, Bloch and Adorno, in which the historical description of the diminished-seventh chord appears, as it were, untransposed in the writings of all three authors; see Paddison, Adorno s Aesthetics, 75-6. Schubert, Adornos Auseinandersetzung , 240. Zur Zwlitontechnik is reprinted in Adorno, Gesammelte Schrifien, ed. Tiedemann, xviii, 363-9. This development was spurred by an exchange of ideas with Ernst Krenek, which appeared in articles and radio addresses in the late 1920s and early 1930s; see Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Krenek, Briefwechsel, ed. Wolfgang Rogge (Frankfurt am Main, 1974). Paddison gives a detailed overview of the exchange in Adorno s Aesthetics, 81-97. 49 Schubert, 'Adornos Auseinandersetzung', 238^O. 50 'Den Schauplatz eines Fortschrittes in Kunst liefern nicht ihre einzelnen Werke sondern ihr Material.' Theodor W. Adorno, 'Reaktion und Fortschritt', Moments musicaux, Gesammelte Schrifien, ed. Tiedemann, xvii: Musikalische Schriften, 4, 133-9 (p. 133).



Compositional techniques were said to be 'contained in the nature of music itself and [. . .] extrapolated from it, rather than imposed on it from the outside'.51

The use of criticism motivated by the (highly questionable) authority of a philosophy of history, and the specific linkage of history and material, remained characteristic of Adorno's writings for the remaining four decades of his life. Unrestrained judgments, laced with appeals to truth and moral duty, gave his writings their unique and complex tone - a tone that was avowedly radical but singularly conservative, that was aggrieved and self-righteous, and that mixed extraordinary intellectual breadth with breathtaking narrow-mindedness. His prejudice was often blatant: Stravinsky's music, for example, was said to be of only minor significance because it avoided a dialectical engagement with musical time, which was said to be 'the essence of all great music since Bach'.5 But his prejudice could also be more subtle, perhaps slipped into a subordinate clause:

The idea, widespread among unreflective artists, of the open eligibility of any and all material is problematic in that it ignores the constraint inherent in technical procedures and the progress of material, which is imposed by various materials as well as by the necessity to employ specific materials.

The phrase 'widespread among unreflective artists' essentially means: whoever holds this idea, and thereby disagrees with me, is unreflective.

Adorno's conception of musical material, however exclusive it may have been, followed from his philosophical engagement with Western culture and his effort to understand the contemporary world. His twentieth century was fully enlightened but

51 Theodor W. Adorno, 'The Prehistory of Serial Music', Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CA, 1999), 54-68 (p. 54). For the original see Theodor W. Adorno, 'Zur Vorgeschichte der Reihenkomposition', Klangguren, Gesammelte Schriften , ed. Tiedemann, xvi: Musikalische Schriften, 1-3, 68-84 (p. 68). Carl Dahlhaus examined and criticized Adorno's use of criticism motivated by Geschichtsphilosophie in the article 'Das Problem der "hheren Kritik": Adornos Polemik gegen Strawinsky', Neue Zeitschrift r Musik, 148 (1987), 9-15. Giselher Schubert presents a brilliant analysis of Adorno's style in his article 'Musik gleich Wahrheit? Theodor W. Adornos Einflu auf die Musikentwicklung in unserem Jahrhundert', Oper aktuell: Die Bayerische Staatsoper 1999/2000, ed. Hanspeter Krellmann (Munich, 2000), 105-12. That is to say, Stravinsky's music avoids the technique of developing variation: 'Strawinskys Musik bleibt Randphnomen [ . . .] weil sie die dialektische Auseinandersetzung mit dem musikalischen Zeitverlauf vermeidet, die das Wesen aller groen Musik seit Bach ausmacht.' Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tiedemann, xii, 171. It must be noted however, that Adorno's judgment of Stravinsky - like his judgment of 12-note technique - was different at different times in his life. A comparison of the different periods is made in Paddison, Adornos Aesthetics, 267-70. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN, 1997), 147- 8; for the German original see Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tiedemann, vii: sthetische Theorie, 222.


290 MARCUS ZAGORSKI

radiant with the triumph of historical catastrophe.56 He believed the human subject was faced with the threat of being either liquidated by totalitarianism or manipulated by capitalism. His desire to preserve subjectivity against these threats informed a philosophical programme that extended to theorizing the difference between the 'open eligibility of any and all [musical] material' and the much smaller subset of what could be considered usable material. This difference, captured in a sentence from sthetische Theorie, a book he was completing at the time of his death in 1969, again reveals the Hegelian thrust behind the linkage of history and material in Adorno's thought: 'Of all the material that is abstractly employable, only the tiniest part does not collide with the condition of the spirit [Stand des Geistes] and is as such concretely usable.'

The full implications of this sentence are best appreciated with a look to the German original, in which the phrase 'Stand des Geistes' is an unmistakable nod to Hegel. Simply put, 'Stand des Geistes' is a reference to the present moment, or condition, of the unfolding history of intersubjective consciousness in Hegelian philosophy. Adorno's admonition to avoid 'collision' with the 'Stand des Geistes' meant that a composer should know to use only that material, among all possible materials, which is recognized as corresponding to the present moment in the unfolding history of Geist. But the appeal to Geist can also be read, and has been read, as an attempt by Adorno to promote particular compositional techniques as superior to others when measured by the dictates of what he deemed to be objective truth.58 Accordingly, the choice of technique had ethical ramifications for Adorno, and his theory of new music in particular is inseparable from the sphere of ethics. Although it remained only a Utopian possibility, something he pointed to but never saw, new music was identified as that which aimed to preserve the promise of subjective freedom and offer a way out of the limitations of dodecaphonic (and serial) composition. The point was made unequivocally in an essay entitled 'Klassik, Romantik, Neue Musik', where Adorno stated that 'above all [. . .] the goal of new music must be the complete liberation of the human subject'.59 In the wake of such ideas, many composers of New Music (for them a proper noun) have considered

56 Or, as stated in the opening paragraph of Dialektik der Aufklrung, 'the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant' ('die vollends aufgeklrte Erde strahlt im Zeichen triumphalen Unheils'). Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York, 1972), 3; for the German original see Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tiedemann, iii: Dialektik der Aufklrung: Philosophische Fragmente, 19. 57 'Von dem abstrakt verfgbaren Material ist nur uerst wenig konkret, also ohne mit dem Stand des Geistes zu kollidieren, verwendbar.' Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Hullot-Kentor, 148; Adorno, sthetische Theorie, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tiedemann, iii, 223. Emphasis added. 58 See especially Dahinaus, 'Das Problem der "hheren Kritik'". Theodor W. Adorno, 'Classicism, Romanticism, New Music , Sound Figures, trans. Livingstone, 106-22 (p. 121); for the German original see Theodor W. Adorno, 'Klassik, Romantik, Neue Musik', Klangfiguren, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tiedemann, xvi, 126-44 (p. 143).


MATERIAL AND HISTORY 29 1

their technical preferences as somehow more ethically responsible than those they shun.

The impure taint of history and a new beginning Adorno's association of new music with ethical imperatives was rooted in a connection between his philosophy of history and his interpretation of how compositional techniques, and therefore musical material, embodied this history. But his philosophy of history was not exclusively Hegelian; it also reflected the ideas of Karl Marx and Max Weber and, as noted above, the zerfallsgeschichtliche perspective of Dialektik der Aufilrung. When Adorno witnessed the dawn of serial composition around 1950, Weber must have seemed especially prescient: as Boulez and other composers began to use the principle of a series to order duration, intensity and timbre in addition to pitch, they amplified what Adorno believed was a long- standing desire to 'grasp and order all sound, and to reduce the magical essence of music to human logic'.

Serialism seemed a paradigmatic example of what Weber called 'Entzauberung'.

l

Boulez may not have seen serialism in this light, though he did use history to legitimate his compositional technique. He was more concerned to rectify the errors he believed Schoenberg had made in restricting the series to the ordering of pitch, as he rather forcefully explained in the essay 'Schoenberg is Dead'.62 First published in 1952, the essay was less an obituary than an expression of Boulez's need to exorcise the lingering ghost of a recently deceased composer. Calling the assessment of

0 Describing dodecaphony, Adorno wrote: 'ein System der Naturbeherrschung in Musik resultiert. Es entspricht einer Sehnsucht aus der brgerlichen Urzeit: was immer klingt, ordnend zu "erfassen", und das magische Wesen der Musik in menschliche Vernunft aufzulsen.' Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tiedemann, xii, 65-6. Weber described the idea as follows: 'The process of increasing intellectualization and rationalization does not mean an increasing general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives. It means something else: the knowledge or belief that, whenever one desired, one could find that there are fundamentally no mysterious, incalculable forces involved [in the conditions under which one lives] , but rather, that all things - in principle - can be controlled by means of calculation. But this means: the dmystification [Entzauberung] of the world' ('Die zunehmende Intellektualisierung und Rationalisierung bedeutet also nicht eine zunehmende allgemeine Kenntnis der Lebensbedingungen, unter denen man steht. Sondern sie bedeutet etwas anderes: das Wissen davon oder den Glauben daran: da man, wenn man nur wollte, es jederzeit erfahren konnte, das es also prinzipiell, keine geheimnisvollen unberechenbaren Mchte gebe, die da hineinspielen, da man vielmehr alle Dinge - im Prinzip - durch Berechnen beherrschen knne. Das aber bedeutet: die Entzauberung der Welt'). See Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf (Munich, 1919; repr. Stuttgart, 1995), 19. The essay appeared first in English in The Score, 6 (1952), 18-22, and was later published in French in a collection of Boulez's essays entitled Relevs d'apprenti, ed. Paule Thvenin (Paris, 1966). Subsequent references are to the English translation of this collection in Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, trans. Walsh; see note 14.


292 MARCUS ZAGORSKI

Schoenberg's work 'one of the most urgent questions that confront us', Boulez found this work to be 'primarily annoying for its flagrant incompatibilities'.

3 His critique specifically mentioned works such as the Variations for Orchestra, op. 31, in which the 12-note technique was thought to be corrupted by tonal architectonics. How, Boulez asked,

could the new [pitch] technique be properly tested if one took no trouble to find specifically serial structures? [ . . .] Schoenberg never concerned himself with the logical connection between serial forms as such and derived structure. This seems to be the reason for the futility of most of his serial output. Since the pre-classical and classical forms which predominate are historically unconnected with dodecaphony, a yawning chasm opens up between the infrastructures of tonality and a language whose organizational principles are as yet but dimly perceived [...]. The architecture annuls any possibility of organization that the new language may possess.

Schoenberg himself, of course, would not have seen dodecaphony as 'unconnected' from his decisions about form. On the contrary, in the essay 'Composition with Twelve Tones', written shortly after the Variations, op. 31, Schoenberg explicitly connected the two: 'form in the arts, and especially in music', he claimed, 'aims primarily at comprehensibility [ . . . and] composition with twelve tones has no other aim than comprehensibility'.65 In fact, it is precisely such comprehensibility, for Schoenberg, that granted artistic value to a work. Furthermore, the composer of the Variations, op. 31, would have seen himself to be deeply concerned with the

'logical connection' between pitch and form that Boulez thought was lacking: in the same essay, Schoenberg stated that 'the possibilities of evolving the formal elements of music [. . .] out of a basic set are unlimited'. 7

Boulez, however, was a composer rather than a historian. Schoenberg may have realized his own ideals, but he had not realized Boulez's, and this was tantamount to

abandoning the progressive cause. The injury is evident in the tone of 'Schoenberg is Dead':

How can one associate oneself unreservedly with an output that displays such contradictions, such illogic? [. . .] How are we to judge this reinstatement of polarized and even tonal functions, if not as one further (and unnecessary) proof of his lack of grasp and cohesion? [ . . .] Have we arrived at a new musical methodology merely so as to reconstruct the old one? So monstrous a trick of incomprehension leaves me speechless.

"J Boulez, Schoenberg is Dead , 209. 64 Ibid., 212. Schoenberg, 'Composition with Twelve Tones ,215. 66 Ibid.

67 Ibid, 222. 68 Boulez, 'Schoenberg is Dead', 213.



The contradictions and absence of logic Boulez believed he saw in Schoenberg's work concern the use of tonal forms and phrase structures which Boulez, like many post- war composers, thought were inconsistent with the new method of non-tonal pitch organization (and which hindered the creation of a new world bent upon erasing its pre-war self). Accordingly, he concluded that Schoenberg's 'investigation of serialism was one-sided: it neglected rhythm, and even, strictly speaking, sound, in the sense of dynamics and modes of attack'.69 It is not difficult to read in these words a project that was realized in Structure la: Example 2 shows how Boulez remedied the apparent neglect of rhythm, dynamics and modes of attack. This expansion of the serial principle seemed, for Boulez, a historical necessity, and the final paragraphs of his essay outline the programme for moving history forward:

Perhaps we should start from dissociating serialism from the work of Schoenberg [...]. Perhaps we might tell ourselves that serialism is a logical consequence of history [...]. Per- haps we might [ . . .] investigate the musical EVIDENCE arising from the attempt at generating structure from material [...]. Perhaps we might generalize the serial principle to the four constituents of sound: pitch, duration, dynamics/attack, and timbre.70

Perhaps we could have no better example of the importance of the concept of material in the discourse of the period. The crucial point here is the perception of a need to generate structure (or form) from material: this would be achieved, for Boulez, by generalizing the serial principle to the 'four constituents of sound: pitch, duration, dynamics/attack, and timbre'. It was precisely this comprehensive application of the series to the so-called parameters of sound that defined the term 'serialism' as it was used in Europe in the 1950s, and, for Boulez, serialism was said to be a 'logical consequence of history'. In other words, because material was seen to generate structure and the technique of serialism, and because serialism was seen as historically necessary, material was inseparable from the philosophy of history, the compositional technique and the aesthetics of the composer. In fact, the concept of material provided the space in which these areas coalesced.

Boulez's historical convictions were realized in sound in his Structure la for two pianos. This piece is hardly paradigmatic of the composer's work; it is merely one of the numerous steps he took in his search for a compositional voice. But many of Boulez's contemporaries believed this particular step embodied the ethos of a new epoch. The composer Konrad Boehmer described it as 'a work that represents the entire era of early serial composition'.72 And his description accorded with Ligeti's

69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 214.

This point is emphatically, and convincingly, argued in Bsche, 'Auf der Suche nach dem Unbekannten'.

72 'Structures I [...] einem Werk, das fr die ganze Epoche frhen seriellen Komponierens steht'. Konrad Boehmer, 'ber rigoroses Komponieren', Das bse Ohr: Texte zur Musik 1961-1991, ed. Burkhard Soll (Cologne, 1993), 33-50 (p. 41).


294 MARCUS ZAGORSKI

assessment of the movement, given in a now famous analytical essay, as a perfect example of the principles of construction used in early serial technique. Boulez's compositional approach was relatively straightforward, and the simplicity and perceived importance of the piece make it an ideal example for study; consequently, analyses of Structure la have appeared repeatedly in literature on post-war music.7 Given the extent of this literature, and because the movement does not admit a great variety of interpretation, interested readers are referred to existing analyses, which give more detail than the few comments offered here.

Example 2 shows the 'material' Boulez used in Structure la, in which the idea of a series of 12 discretely quantified elements was applied not only to pitch but also to duration, intensity (dynamics) and timbre (attack types). The pitches, durations and attack types were, as is well known, taken from the third of Messiaen's Quatre tudes de rythme, the 'Mode de valeurs et d'intensits' (1949), in a gesture of compositional homage to Boulez's teacher; the series of 12 intensities is an expanded version of the seven intensits used by Messiaen in the tude. An order number, printed above the pitches, was assigned to each element in Boulez's four series, which ensured that these elements could be identified by the composer after the series were transformed by retrograde, inversion and retrograde inversion. Example 4 shows how each of the four series is transformed by inversion. Although all four series are said here to be inverted, obviously only the elements of the pitch series have structural relationships that allow for inversion. Elements in the other three series are merely reshuffled in correspon- dence with the order number assigned in the prime form shown in Example 2.

After Boulez had devised tables, or 'matrices', in which all versions of the number series - prime, retrograde, inversion, retrograde inversion and their transpositions - were represented, the structure of Structure la was generated by reading through these tables and writing out the corresponding musical values. Consequently, all aspects of sound in the movement - pitch, duration, articulation and dynamics - were structured by the number tables derived from the original series of 12 pitches. In a 1958 essay entitled 'Musik und Zahl' ('Music and Number'), Koenig observed that numbers thereby became the medium of musical data and processes that were detached from acoustic reality.75 Example 3 reproduces the opening seven bars of the piece, in which each piano presents one complete statement of 12 pitches coupled

73 Gyrgy Ligeti, 'Pierre Boulez: Entscheidung und Automatik in der Structure la', die Reibe, 4 (1958), 38^63 (p. 38). In addition to Ligeti, 'Pierre Boulez', see for example: Toop, 'Messiaen/Goeyvaerts, Fano/Stockhausen, Boulez'; Danuser, Die Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, 303-7; Reginald Smith Brindle, The New Music: The Avant-Garde since 1945 (2nd edn, Oxford, 1987), 25-33; Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music , 342-5; Grant, Serial Music, 150-5; and Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, v, 27-37, which examines more of the movement than most other sources (excepting Ligeti, of course). 75 Gottfried Michael Koenig, 'Musik und Zahl', Gottfried Michael Koenig, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn, Musik-Konzepte, 66 (Munich, 1989), 13-34; quoted in Gianmario Borio, 'Wege des sthetischen Diskurses', Im Zenit der Moderne, ed. Borio and Danuser, i, 427-69 (pp. 445-6).



Example 4. Pierre Boulez, Structure la, series in inversion.

1 7 3 10 12 9 2 11 6 4 8 5

I'"' ^o ii ^ > "" qo i,, i Ih> *" ^

p p" p" rl r rp p rl' p" p r p~p quasi quasi

pppp mf pp ff Sf f ppp fff p p f p > . _ - > > v P. ^ ^ normal

with one complete statement of 12 durations.76 As noted already, this example conveys the new musical texture, called 'pointillistic' at the time, and new conception of musical space that resulted from Boulez's compositional technique: both were consciously far removed from the clearly delineated hierarchy of parts seen in music of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A shared desire for such new conceptions of texture and space - as well as a desire for the destruction of rhetorical phrase structure, clear motives and developmental form -

help to explain why Structure la was thought to exemplify the interests of serial composers in the early 1950s. Similar ideas were pursued in different ways by different composers, several of whom were inspired by the example of Messiaen's 'Mode de valeurs et d'intensits'. Stockhausen, for example, identified such ideals in an 'Arbeitsbericht' (work report) he penned at the time: he wrote of a new idea of sound, which bore no resemblance to the music of the past; he envisioned a new form, which would result from a lack of conventional opening and closing gestures, phrases and development, and which he thought would be consistent with non-tonal pitch material; and he called for a compositional approach that generated 'pure intellectual note-constructions', which he thought were in accord with the historical moment.77

Stockhausen's turn of phrase ('pure intellectual note-constructions'), reminiscent of Eduard Hanslick, did indeed represent a turn against the pathological and subjective expressive gestures of tonality in favour of an approach that was thought to be rational and objective, and which would guarantee a 'pure' music free of historical associations. The ideal of purity was also expressed by others. Describing the merits

7 Piano I presents the untransposed prime order of pitches (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12) in durations from the fifth transposition of the retrograde inversion (12, 11, 9, 10, 3, 6,7, 1, 2, 8, 4, 5); Piano II presents the untransposed inversion order of pitches (1, 7, 3, 10, 12, 9, 2, 11, 6, 4, 8, 5) in durations from the twelfth transposition of the retrograde (5, 8, 6, 4, 3, 9, 2, 1, 7, 11, 10, 12). 77 Stockhausen, 'Arbeitsbericht 1952/53', 32. Stockhausen's phrase is 'rein gedankliche Tonkonstruk- tionen'.

78 And it suggests a paradox: the ideal of purity was widespread because of a shared desire to cleanse music of associations with the immediate past, and the paradox arises from a suggested relationship 'between radical artistic purisms and their political cousins' - a relationship upon which, Taruskin believes, no one at the time was inclined to reflect. See Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, v, 17.


296 MARCUS ZAGORSKI

of Boulez's Structure la, Ligeti wrote of a 'beauty in the discovery of pure structures',79 and Boulez himself stated that his intention with this composition was to create a synthesis of elements 'which would not be marred from the start by foreign bodies'.80 The 'foreign bodies' were the remnants of the tradition he detected, and detested, in Schoenberg's dodecaphonic works - old rhythms and forms that were seen to compromise the potential of the new method of pitch organization. Such traces of tonality carried references to the 'bad old days' before 1945, when tonal music became associated with the propaganda of totalitarian regimes; paradoxically, it was the rigorous order of serialism that was seen to offer the freedom of a new beginning.

Overcoming the past and embracing the imagined purity and objectivity of a new compositional language were thought to be benefits of obeying the 'conditions' dictated by musical material. The kind of thinking that was, according to Stockhausen's 'Arbeitsbericht', 'appropriate for the material itself [materialgerecht]', forged an 'agreement of the laws of form with the conditions of the material' . 'The idea of new form', he asserted, 'is not compatible with the conditions of the old material. One must therefore seek a new material.'82 Once in possession of this new material, composers who shared Stockhausen's ideas believed themselves compelled to meet the material's demand to generate new forms - forms purged of the foreign bodies of an impure past. The seeming dangers of subjective decision-making could be set aside in deference to what was thought to be an objective process that not only determined the material fit for the spirit of the day, but also the kinds of forms that were implicit in - because consistent with - this material.

In another essay from this time, Stockhausen insisted, with almost fanatical repetition, on the need for structuring pieces according to a unifying principle - for consistency (his term is 'Widerspruchslosigkeit') between the individual elements and the totality:

Note-ordering means the subordination of notes under a unifying principle, which is conceived beforehand. And: [it means] consistency between the ordering of the individual elements and the whole [...]. Pre-existing note-orderings (such as modes and scales

79 Ligeti, 'Pierre Boulez', 62. Bsche is very critical of Ligeti's description, which he believes has been so often repeated that it tends to reduce the understanding of Boulez's creative output, an output that is as various as it is inspired by various sources, to one sentence. That may be, but it should not be controversial to note that Ligeti did describe Structure la in this way. See Bsche, 'Auf der Suche nach dem Unbekannten', 40-1.

80 Pierre Boulez, 'Ncessit d'une orientation esthtique (II)', Canadian University Music Review, 7 (1986), 46-79; quoted in Toop, 'Messiaen/Goeyvaerts, Fano/Stockhausen, Boulez', 144. 81 A central argument of Grant's Serial Music is that new compositional methods were associated with the freedom of a new and limitless potential. 'Die Idee der neuen Form lt sich aber nicht mit den Bedingungen des alten Materials vereinbaren. Also mu man ein neues Material suchen.' Stockhausen, 'Arbeitsbericht 1952/53', 32. See also note 3.



[Tonsysteme], themes, motives, rows, 'rhythms', folklorisms and so forth) are [...] unusable (for these are already ordered in their own individual ways); they are unusable for the realization of a unified conception of music, which only a unified material- ordering can create [ . . .] and which should be newly and uniquely executed in each new work according to the demands of the perfection and ordering of the totality - that is, if one recognizes and accepts the necessity of total order. That which is pre-formed cannot be integrated [eingeordnet] but only arranged. Uniform ordering [Ein-Ordnung] , however, is a condition for consistency [...]. The kind of music that has begun to be composed recently is bound with the necessity to recognize and no longer accept the lack of consistency in that which is pre-formed [...]. Approaching the perfection of material- ordering means the constant presence of the unifying idea [...]. Its prerequisite is, that the individual element already carries within itself- and indeed consistently - all the ordering criteria that the entire work will make its own.

The organicist ideal evident here (to say nothing of the desire for 'total order'), despite being linked to a past that some so urgently wanted to move beyond, was shared by other serial composers of the period (even though Stockhausen himself failed to live up to his own programme). Schnebel, for example, in no way a 'dismantled of such ideas, articulated a view that borrowed both from Stockhausen's position above and Boulez's position in 'Schoenberg is Dead'. Moreover, he maintained this view not only in the 1950s, which he referred to as 'a golden age of serial composition' that was led by a 'great new idea' in which he took part, but as late as the 1990s.85 Schnebel still believed, 40 years after the golden age, that

83 'Tonordnung meint also die Unterordnung von Tnen unter ein einheitliches Prinzip, das vorgestellt ist. Und: Widerspruchslosigkeit zwischen der Ordnung im Einzelnen und im Ganzen [...]. Bereits vorhandene Tonordnungen (Tonsysteme, Themen, Motive, Reihen, 'Rhythmen', Folklorismen u. a.) sind [...] unbrauchbar (als bereits in einer jedem Einzelnen eigenen Weise geordnet), unbrauchbar fr die Verwirklichung einer einheitlichen Vorstellung von Musik, die ja erst eine ihr geme Materialordnung hervorrufen kann [ . . .] und die sich mit einem Anspruch von Totalitt (in Hinsicht auf Vollkommenheit von Ordnung) in jedem Werk neu und einmalig vollziehen soll - wenn man die Notwendigkeit totaler Ordnung einsieht und akzeptiert. Vorgeformtes kann nicht eingeordnet, nur arrangiert werden. Ein-Ordnung aber ist eine Bedingung fr Widerspruchslosigkeit [...]. [Musik . . .] wie sie in jngster Zeit begonnen hat, ist mit der Notwendigkeit verbunden, Vorgeformtes in seiner Widerspruchshaftigkeit zu erkennen und nicht lnger zu akzeptieren [...]. Annherung an Vollkommenheit von Materialordnung meint aber stndige Anwesenheit des Einen [...]. Voraussetzung ist allerdings, da das Einzelne bereits alle Ordnungskriterien in sich trgt - und zwar widerspruchslos - , die dem ganzen Werk zu eigen sind.' Karlheinz Stockhausen, 'Situation des Handwerks (Kriterien der punktuellen Musik)', Texte, ed. Schnebel, i, 17-23 (pp. 18-21). The significant disparity between Stockhausen's stated ideals and actual compositions is evident in the deviations Richard Toop traces in Klavierstck VIII. See Richard Toop, 'Stockhausen's Klavierstck VIII' Contact, 28 (1984), 4-19. In an interview with Klaus Kropfnger in 1991, Schnebel describes the years 1950-5 as the 'Hochblte des seriellen Komponierens' that was '[von] eine[r] groen neue[n] Idee [geleitet]'. Quoted in Klaus Kropfnger, 'Schoenberg est mort? Rckfragen an einer Paradigma', ber Musik im Bilde, 2 vols. (Cologne, 1995), ii, 535-56 (p. 542).


298 MARCUS ZAGORSKI

Schoenberg was a 'dead end'; to support his point, he argued that 'when you look at the score of [Schoenberg's] Fourth Quartet, it looks like a late Beethoven quartet, only the pitches are completely different [ . . .] and that is already a great contradiction [Widerspruch] between material and form'. As well as linking his critique to material, Schnebel gets additional service from the term 'Widerspruch' so frequently used by Stockhausen 40 years earlier. An idea not at all unique to these two composers, however, the preservation of unity within a composition has been identified as one of the two primary concerns of serialism, the other being the search for new compositional categories that followed from the reaction against tonal conventions.

Progress and the aesthetics of experimentation The search for new categories led to a new aesthetic outlook in which composition was conceived as an ongoing process of experimentation rather than an effort to produce independent, timeless works. These experiments could be seen in pieces such as Structure la, in which, according to Ligeti in 1958,

composition loses its essence as 'artwork': the act of composing becomes at the same time a research into the newly perceived cohesion of the material. This may seem to be a negative, 'unartistic' attitude; but the composer today has no other path if he truly wants to move forward. For Boulez, Structure la represented just such fundamental

88 experimentation.

The act of composing was described as research into the structure of material, from which followed a surrender of the claim to the production of works. This fundamental experimentation was represented not only by Structure la; rather, Ligeti stated that all composers should follow this path if they wished to effect progress.

Stockhausen made similar claims in his 'Arbeitsbericht' five years earlier:

One can no longer count on the immediate [familiar] idea of sound. The idea of sound is determined by all music that one has previously hea

Material and History in the Aesthetics of 'Serielle Musik'

Documents

Transcript of Material and History in the Aesthetics of 'Serielle Musik'