The New York Times, August 3, 1997

In Contemporary Music, a House Still Divided

By K. ROBERT SCHWARZ

During the decades when most Americans were caught up
in rock-and-roll, bebop, Motown, fusion, funk and
disco, the field incongrously dubbed "contemporary
classical music" was riven by a schism so deep that that
it has yet to close. Anyone tracing the recent history
of that music confronts two mutually exclusive
scenarios, each claiming to represent the truth.

These parallel histories are the legacy of an archetypal
struggle between modernism and traditionalism similar to
the battle then taking place in the visual arts. The
post-World War II modernists, believing that they had
discovered the music of the future, championed a
deliberately atonal, highly systematized method of
composition called Serialism. By the 1960's, the
Serialists commanded intellectual prestige and held
influential academic posts. All they lacked was a
public.

In fact, mainstream audiences disliked their work,
preferring the music of traditionalists who retained
links with tonality: Copland, Barber, Prokofiev,
Shostakovich and Britten. In academic circles, those
composers were sneered at, viewed as expendable fossils
from a bygone age.

Today the two camps find their roles reversed. A
broadly backlash against Serialism arose in the
1970's, and there was soon a profusion of
Minimalists and neo-Romantics. Amid this new post-modernist diversity,
Serialism faded in power and prestige. What was supposed
to be the music of the future had become the music of
the past.

Indeed, the very term Serialism has become so burdened
with pejorative associations that even the leaders of
the movement no longer wish to be identified with it.
"If anyone writes program notes and says I am a Serial
or a 12-tone composer, I am infuriated," Donald Martino
said. "I don't want to prejudice people with that."

What sort of prejudices might accrue? Milton Babbitt is
blunt: "It's used very much in the way 'mathematical'
has been used with regard to music, as a word of
automatic, ultimate derogation."

After the Chaos of War, a System

That was not how things were supposed to turn out. In
1908, when Arnold Schoenberg first broke with tonality,
he embarked on a journey both liberating and terrifying.
Lacking any system of key around which his music could
gravitiate, Schoenberg faced complete harmonic freedom
-- and, perhaps, chaos. No composer who saw himself in
the lineage of Beethoven and Brahms could tolerate such
a prospect.

In 1924, he made public his invention, the 12-tone
method, designed to provide a systematic way of
composing atonal music. Each work was built from a row
(or series), a unique and predetermined ordering of the
12 pitches. If all the melodic material retained the
order of the row (or one of its standard
transformations), a composer was assured of both
atonality and rational structure. "I have discovered
something that will insure the supremacy of German music
for the next hundred years," Schoenberg boasted.

Hitler's rise to power in Germany prompted an exodus of
artists to the United States, Schoenberg among them. The
horrific carnage of World War II led many American
composers (and some of their European counterparts) to
view the past with revulsion. What better way to
renounce the past than to adopt a rigorous compositional
technique that promised a cool, detached objectivity?
Now Schoenberg's 12-tone system, which had limited
itself to pitch, was viewed as just the first step on
the road to total systematization.

Mr. Babbitt, who was trained in mathematics as well as
in music, was the prime architect of Serialism, an
extension of the 12-tone system that predetermined not
only pitch but also rhythm, duration and other elements
of composition. Strict application of the technique
would sever all audible links with the past. As a
result, Serial music -- shorn of familiar elements like
tonal center, melodic profile and rhythmic pulse -- was
profoundly disorienting to the average listener.

Proponents of Serialism argued that its multiple layers
of systematization were no more constraining than the
conventions imposed by the tonal system. No one made
more strident claims on its behalf than the French
composer Pierre Boulez, for whom it had all the force of
a historical imperative. "Every musician who has not
felt -- we do not say understood, but indeed felt -- the
necessity of the Serial language is USELESS," he wrote
in 1952.

The Two Histories of 'One True Faith'

Although Mr. Babbitt and his disciples were far less
dogmatic, the underlying message was clear: if you
wished to be taken seriously as a composer, you had
better employ Serial technique. And it is here that the
parallel histories of American music arise. Tonal
composers recall an era of Serial control during which
they were ridiculed and their music scorned. Serial
composers recall a time in which they struggled for
recognition and support, and could find it only in the
university.

"Serialism's most publicly aggressive proponents, early
and late, presented and still present it as the only
true faith," said George Rochberg, who was entranced by
Serialism in the 1950's but re-embraced tonality in the
60's. "As such, they have proclaimed an orthodox
cultural church, with its hierarchy, gospels, beliefs
and anathemas. After the end of World War II it very
quickly captured and dominated American academic
circles, which it monstrously and bluntly politicized."

"Dominated" is the key word. Many now maintain that the
Serialists took over academia, insuring that their
quasi-scientific method, which was ideal for the
university, was the only one encouraged. As they gained
prestige, the argument continues, they took control of
grant-giving bodies, new-music ensembles and
competitions. Everyone else was shut out, especially
those reactionary tonal composers.

"There's this notion that we somehow dominated the
prestigious Ivy League schools," Mr. Babbitt said, "but
we never dominated anything. This is propaganda. It was
simply not the case. I was here at Princeton with Roger
Sessions. Was there anybody then at Columbia or Yale or
Harvard? The attitude was very anti-Serial. And consider
how long it took most of us to get a Guggenheim, if
ever, or any other award."

Charles Wuorinen, at 59 a generation younger than Mr.
Babbitt, reacts to the notion of Serialist control with
restrained fury.

"The story goes around that there was a period during
which this terrible Serial music was supposed to be
dominant, some composers were forced to do it when they
really didn't want to, and then they revolted and
produced lovely melodies in C major," he said. "This is
all nonsense. When I was a young composer at Columbia,
the reigning orthodoxy was, on one hand, a kind of
Coplandesque Americana and, on the other hand, the
symphonism of Howard Hanson and Roy Harris. That was
true everywhere. And in my entire life I have never seen
anybody make someone write any particular kind of music.
It's not that a bunch of beady-eyed theoreticians are
forcing innocent students to do terrible, nameless
things. So the whole story is a big fake."

John Corigliano attended Columbia from 1955 to 1959, the
same years as Mr. Wuorinen. But Mr. Corigliano recalls a
university where Serialism had become the official
academic manner: "By the time I got to Columbia, this
was already the case. It wasn't that I was prohibited
from writing the way I felt. But the general mode of
thought was certainly not in my direction."

Moreover, the notion persists that young composers were
made to feel that Serialism was their only viable
option. And it may be true, if the first paragraph of
Mr. Wuorinen's textbook "Simple Composition," of 1979,
is any indication.

"While the tonal system, in an atrophied or vestigial
form, is still used today in popular and commercial
music, and even occasionally in the works of
backward-looking serious composers, it is no longer
employed by serious composers of the mainstream," he
writes. "It has been replaced or succeeded by the
12-tone system."

Those "backward-looking" composers did not react
charitably to such dismissals. "We were treated as if we
didn't exist," Ned Rorem said of the atmosphere in the
1960's, when he returned to America after a decade in
Paris. "I asked myself where I stood as a composer, am I
doing something wrong? But I can't change horses in
midstream, and I wouldn't even if I could."

Another tonal composer, William Mayer, concurs. "To be a
tonal composer in the 60's and 70's was a deeply
dispiriting experience," he said. "One was shunned as
the last teen-aged virgin."

A Dwindling Audience for New Music

Stravinsky and Copland, perhaps the most famous members
of the tonal faction, shocked their colleagues by
embracing Serialism in the 1950's. Were they browbeaten
intellectually, as some latter-day tonal composers
claim?

"I don't tell people they're on right paths or wrong
paths," Mr. Babbitt says with winning innocence. "I
don't even know what they are. Again, this is a kind of
revisionism. At that time, most of us didn't have very
good jobs, performances certainly not, and often 12-tone
composers were kept from getting awards. Many people
would look at a work, and if they could count up to 12
in it, they would reject it from any consideration
whatsoever."

Mr. Wuorinen insists that he never spurned tonal
composers. "I don't know that that is the term to use,"
he said. "We were not interested in that kind of music.
It wasn't a question of scorning it. It simply didn't
concern us. There is an irrepressible journalistic
tendency to create conflict where there may not be any."

Mr. Martino agrees that any hand-wringing on the part of
tonal composers is misplaced. "Those are the people who
got the performances," he said. "The idea that Copland
and Barber suffered because of what Serial composers
said or wrote about them is preposterous. But there was,
and still is, the prevailing notion among us that it's
pretty damn difficult to write tonal music in the 20th
century and think it compares favorably with Beethoven
and Brahms."

Clearly, these radically opposed recollections of recent
history are not easily reconciled. But one issue is
beyond dispute: The rise and fall of Serialism had a
decided impact on the concertgoing public. Gradually,
mainstream listeners decided that new music, by
definition, must be impenetrable and alienating, and
many chose to forsake it entirely.

Rather than regretting the gap between composer and
audience, Mr. Babbitt saw it as an inevitable result of
a poorly educated public's confronting a highly
specialized music. In a 1958 article, "Who Cares if You
Listen?" (the infamous title was written by an editor),
he argued that Serial music had attained a level of
complexity comparable to that of the latest theories in
mathematics or science, which would be similarly
incomprehensible to the layman.

"I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and
his music an immediate and eventual service by total,
resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world
to one of private performance and electronic media," he
wrote, "with its very real possibility of complete
elimination of the public and social aspects of musical
composition."

Today, Mr. Babbitt insists that he never intended to
reject the audience, merely to question its right to
pass snap judgments on first hearing. "Rights have to be
gained by the acquiring of appropriate abilities," he
said. "Because of the decline in music education, we're
producing not only illiterate musical audiences but
arrogant ones. They have no idea what music has been, so
how can they have any idea of what music is or could
be?"

But others suggest that a composer who adopts a
condescending and dismissive attitude toward the
audience is the one behaving arrogantly.

"If you want to approach music on the level of
scientific research, then you can only expect another
scientist to understand it," Mr. Corigliano said. "But
then don't be bitter that the public is not sitting and
listening to it. And don't say to them: 'You may not
understand this, but it's great art. It's good for you,
so you must be suitably impressed.' "

Nonbelievers and Renegades

Beginning in the 1970's, a number of younger composers
bucked the Serial tide and returned to tonality. Some,
like the Minimalists Steve Reich and Philip Glass, made
substantial freelance careers outside academia. Others,
like the onetime Serialists Mr. Rochberg and David Del
Tredici, continued to work within the university
setting, and therefore received special condemnation.

"For those in the Serialist camp, I had committed the
high crime of treason," Mr. Rochberg said of the
reaction to his squarely tonal String Quartet No. 3, of
1971. "I had openly defected, without apology. But I was
dissatisfied with the narrow strictures within which
musical thought could take place. Basically, Serialism
is an ice-cold, stingy, parsimonious form of human
expression."

Perhaps because Mr. Del Tredici was a former
Princetonian, or perhaps because his "Final Alice," of
1976, was so maniacal in its assertion of tonality, he
was the object of particular scorn. His peers "were all
comfortably settled into Serialism as The Way, so it was
an affront," he said. "Tonality was perceived as a
threat, and the more tonal the composer, the more
threatening."

By the 1980's there were plenty of Minimalists,
post-Minimalists, neo-tonalists and neo-Romantics
competing for attention, and Serialism was becoming an
ever less significant force. Yet even today, hostility
toward the new persists among audiences, one of the more
toxic components of the Serial legacy.

"Audiences associate anything new with atonal and Serial
music," said the 37-year-old composer Aaron Jay Kernis.
"So automatically I'm put in a position of having to
defend everything I do, of having to get through all
this baggage. I have to start at ground zero every time
and convince the audience that my music won't taste like
castor oil."

Others have been even blunter. The music historian
Richard Taruskin aimed a broadside at Serialism last
year in these pages, and the tone of the piece caused
some to wonder why the assault had been necessary.

"I don't know why 12-tone and Serial music comes up
periodically as a subject needing validation," said the
composer Arthur Berger, who is now 85. "In this time of
political correctness, there is room for minorities, and
those of us who write nontonal music realize it may not
be popular. But it shouldn't be judged by the number of
people who subscribe to it."

Positive Legacies: Discipline and Attitude

The legacy Serialism has bequeathed a younger generation
is hardly the one Schoenberg envisioned when, in 1941,
he predicted that mastery of 12-tone technique would be
"an unconditional prerequisite for obtaining admission
to the composition class of a conservatory." In fact,
few young composers use 12-tone or Serial technique with
any consistency, and hardly any employ it rigorously.

"You can certainly say that most students are not
writing 12-tone music," said Mr. Babbitt. "Most of them
have very little conception what it is, and if you go
into any depth or detail, they're lost."

The young composers who use Serialism do so
unsystematically, viewing it merely as one option among
many. "It has left us with just another technique to use
in our arsenal of expressive tools," said the
42-year-old Jeffrey Mumford, who is sympathetic to
Serialism. "When I use a row in my work, I'm not
dogmatic about it, and certainly it's not thorough or
all-pervasive."

Many are less sympathetic, and some, like the
41-year-old Steve Mackey, seem downright disdainful.
"Not long ago Serialism was the common currency, and
with that came tremendous arrogance," he said. "The
religious metaphor was great: 'If only you understood
Serialism, then you, too, would be a convert.' It's too
bad that in its waning years the polemic gained this
desperate, pathetic flavor: 'Oh please, please, if only
you knew Jesus, you'd like him.' "

Mr. Mackey teaches at Princeton, where Mr. Babbitt is
still active at 81. Yet the only praise Mr. Mackey can
muster for Serialism is for its pedagogic value.

"It was incredible discipline, it was ear-training, and
I'm sure that must continue to affect me," he said. "But
now it's back there with parallel fifths and imitative
counterpoint and other relics of the past."

Reduced to the equivalent of training wheels, Serialism
seems far removed from the supremacy Schoenberg
predicted. But if it is defined in broader terms, its
legacy may be more profound than suspected.

Consider the relationship between Serialism and its
supposed archenemy, Minimalism. Early Minimalist works
revolved around what Steve Reich called "process," a
systematic structure that unfolded gradually over the
course of a composition. Mr. Reich's obsession with
structural rigor undoubtedly reflected his Serialist
training.

David Lang, the 40-year-old co-founder of the Bang on a
Can Festival, may come closest to defining the legacy of
Serialism when he speaks of "an attitude."

"What it left composers of my generation was the idea
that there is virtue in a well-made piece," Mr. Lang
said. "All of my pieces are mathematical, they are built
from controlled patterns, and intellectual rigor is very
important. The idea that you get to a higher level
musically by controlling the structure -- that there is
something about the architecture of the piece that is
really important -- is a direct descendant of my Serial
training."

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K. Robert Schwarz is the author of "Minimalists."