Serial Composition and Atonality

Abstract

UP TO NO W, the few available books attempting to deal generally with atonal and twelve-tone music have consistently failed to reveal any awareness of the significant approaches recently developed to the fundamental theoretic, analytic, and compositional implications of systematic pitch organization. For the most part, these works offer little beyond routine restatement of the traditional rules of procedure originally propounded as guide lines during the early stages of twelvetone composition, which in practice almost immediately underwent extensive modification, and analyses consisting primarily of simple set identifications and note counting. The triviality of the actual material presented is often masked behind pretentious metaphysical and pseudohistorical, pseudoscientific justifications whose origin is in those similar statements by Schoenberg that constitute the least fruitful aspect of his thought. This preponderance is particularly lamentable in view of the defenselessness of many readers against the fallacies and misconceptions that abound in such facile productions. Most of the genuinely rigorous thought in this field has been presented in articles of a highly specialized nature which are either inaccessible or require for their comprehension a degree of prior experience and training that is, to say the least, far from prevalent even among professional musicians. As a result, an important, perhaps the most important, development in contemporary musical thought has taken place and is rapidly expanding out of reach, in the absence of a comprehensive general statement of its principles and attitudes, of the majority of those for whom it has the greatest interest and consequence. The present book takes an important step toward supplying this deficiency by examining classical atonal and twelve-tone works in terms of their relation to some of the central concerns by which current theoretical work is motivated. Serial Composition and Atonality is, within this general realm, a personal approach that focuses on issues and instances that seem of particular importance to the author. Perle's deep and productive involvement, as composer and analyst, with this

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