The New York Times, August 17, 1997

CLASSICAL VIEW / By PAUL GRIFFITHS

Surviving the Siege, but Barely

Death Knells for music's chief modernist impulse,
Serialism, are being rung with increasing frequency
and, it would seem, little grief. Change a couple of
letters, and we find another phenomenon whose demise has
been similarly celebrated in recent years, and perhaps
with the same degree of prematureness: Socialism.

The correspondences go beyond wordplay. Just as people
gleefully tore at the Berlin wall, so certain composers
and musical commentators now rush to dismantle what they
regard as the superannuated debris of Serialism.
Schoenberg and Webern, the Lenin and Trotsky of 12-tone
composition, are toppled from their pedestals.
Latter-day Serialists, like Milton Babbitt or Pierre
Boulez, are presented as dinosaurs: as Castros of music,
ruling with dwindling power over dwindling resources.
There is even a suggestion in the air that Serialism
somehow confined its audiences in chains of major
sevenths, and that now the musical world is happily
free.

Of course, such a representation of Serialism and all
its works is a willful caricature. While it is certainly
true that Schoenberg was fiercely dogmatic and
authoritarian in his public pronouncements and private
actions, toward the end of his life, in his 60's and
70's, he wrote as many tonal as atonal or Serial pieces,
and the clearest lessons of his output have nothing to
do with denying the past or forbidding variety. For him,
radical change was prompted by a reverence for the
tradition, and a reverence for the tradition
necessitated radical change; traditions are continued
not by imitation but by growth. And growth can proceed
in many different directions, even within the work of
one composer.

As for Serialism's now being over, there is plenty of
evidence otherwise. The possibility of making new music
without recourse to tonal harmony -- which is what is
really at issue here, not some particular composing
technique that was developed three-quarters of a century
ago -- is being shown right now by Mr. Babbitt's
creative vitality and by the works of such composers as
Gyorgy Ligeti, Elliott Carter, Luciano Berio and
Harrison Birtwistle, not to mention many more of a
younger generation.

But the parallel with Socialism can be maintained in
that Serialism arose out of desires and needs to
organize things in essentially different and, it was
hoped, better ways. A system that grew up during the
18th and 19th centuries -- a system of keys and themes,
of symphonic forms and regular rhythms -- had become so
widespread as to seem normal. But it left a great deal
out of account. In particular, it left little
alternative but to regard as "primitive" any music
composed before the system came into full operation or
any music arising in non-Western cultures.

Serialism changed the rules. It refused to accept the
old system as natural and eternal, and it proposed ways
of setting up new systems. Far from being proscriptive,
it widened the range of what could be considered music
and of how music could be made. And -- this was its most
revolutionary idea -- it proposed that musical
organization is not God-given but man-made.

To make that point with the greatest possible force,
Serialist composers have sometimes gone out of their way
to avoid what had previously been taken as natural
items: octaves, common chords, consistent pulse and so
on. The effect can be salutary. We have to reconsider
our preconceptions. We have to think about how we
understand music, and about what we want music to be for
us.

But Serialism can also be more accommodating to what we
know and think we know, as it has been on so many
occasions since Alban Berg's Violin Concerto, of 1935.
There can be encounters and mixtures of old and new,
humane balances between the pulls of innovation and
recall. The record of diversity is clear and cannot just
be dismissed wholesale -- least of all by those whose
business is with creating music or presenting it to the
public.

The wish to return to the past, however understandable,
is bound to remain unfulfilled. It is not somehow
natural and easy but exceedingly difficult to restore
within oneself the creative mentality of another era, as
is indicated by the poverty of so much present-day music
that congratulates itself on being "traditional." We
live in a very different world from Haydn's or even
Brahms's, and we should expect our music to reflect that
fact. Indeed, we should be intolerant of new music that
fails to do so. If we want to know what it was like to
live in earlier times, the music of earlier times
exists, in profusion, to tell us.

Perhaps, though, the resurrection of "traditional"
values is provoked not so much by nostalgia as by envy.
Beethoven's music is, for lots of reasons, conspicuously
more successful at the box office than Mr. Babbitt's or
Mr. Ligeti's. Could it be that this is what some of our
composers, performers, critics and promoters want: not
music that offers something new in the way of
imaginative experience but music that shifts more
product; not music that tells more but music that sells
more?

This would be a commanding irony. Serialism came into
the musical world at a time when long-accepted criteria
were being questioned. It overturned the old hierarchies
of a settled musical system and, eventually, of a
centering on Europe (and specifically on Vienna). It
cleared the ground, on which it could erect its shiny
new architecture. It left only one certainty, and that
deadly: the keystone of commerce, that the market is all
we need to determine what matters.



Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company