tuohey

This really is a tired argument. The answer depends upon how you define serialism. Personally, I like Milton Babbitt's definition: '… a serial relation is one which induces on a collection of objects a strict, simple ordering; that is, an order relation which is irreflexive, nonsymmetric, transitive, and connected over the collection. The term ‘serial’ designates nothing with regard to the number of elements, or the operations—if any—applicable to the elements or the relations among them. A musical work, then, can be described as serial with regard to, say pitch, if the pitch content is most completely and most simply characterized as fulfilling such an ordering with regard to temporal and/or spatial precedence.’ By this definition, you could argue that it isn't really dead. Granted, you're unlikely to find a contemporary composition that strictly follows some sort of serial organisation from beginning to end, but you will find many localised instances of serial ordering within a contemporary composition. I suppose you could argue that Thomas Adès' use of interlocking interval cycles is an example of serial ordering. A simple canon could even be classed as an example of serial ordering. In fact, you could even argue that an isorhythmic motet from the 14th century is a serial composition. Bell changes are a form of serial ordering. Early minimalism is often serial, in the sense that it relies on process. Some spectral music is serial in a sense, as musical decisions are often dictated by the data from a Fast Fourier Transform. In my opinion, serialism has always and will always be used by composers of all styles of music in some form or other, whether they're aware of it or not. It's not dead or alive; it's just a set of tools that have been absorbed into a larger musical lexicon. I suspect that the real question is this: is the musical aesthetic that is most commonly associated with serialism, i.e. music created roughly between 1920-1960 that uses serial organisation as a means of creating a sort of "anti-tonality" that explicitly seeks to avoid any form of tonal reference, dead? For most people, the answer to that is probably yes. Though you can't ignore the fact that there are a lot of composers still around who are about 60+ who still adhere to this aesthetic. They may not be "important" but they certainly exist.

Why does it have to be one or the other? I've had plenty of composition classes but it doesn't mean I don't experiment by myself. In fact, most of my classes to date have consisted of me bringing in sketches and ideas that I'd come up with by experimenting then having my teacher suggest areas for improvement, highlight technical issues/flaws and just generally nudge me in the right direction to turn it into a piece of music that I'm reasonably happy with. It's always good to have someone listen to your music with a critical ear, even more so when that ear belongs to someone who is a much better composer than you.

I can't speak for my current composition professor because I haven't met him yet, but my old one, while being a serial composer himself, was nothing like the professor you mention. He was always encouraging all of his students to go in whatever stylistic direction they wanted to. If I'm honest, I suppose there was a bit of a clique of people who he liked and people he didn't but that was more to do with the amount of effort students were willing to put in rather than an adherence to a particular style or methodology. I think most professors are smart enough to realise that the world has moved on since their day, so it surprises me that a professor would make a big deal about students using serial methods or not. Of course, every professor is a person with unique, subjective tastes so they may value certain aesthetic ideals over others, but I'd still expect them to be able to appreciate a good piece of work even if it isn't to their tastes. In my opinion, if there is one style that composition professors seem to be favouring at the moment, I'd say it's a sort of quasi-tonal post-modernism (whatever that even means), but that's sort of symptomatic of the direction that contemporary music as a whole seems to be moving in. It seems like you have been unlucky with your professor but I don't think the sort of serial elitism you're talking about is widespread in universities at all. Not in 2013 anyway.

http://www.iscm.org/news.php#composers

I think the best thing to do is just continue to write, even if the result is awful. I don't think I've ever had some sudden burst of inspiration to write a piece. What I normally do is start writing something that is usually pretty bad, and about half way through writing it, I'll usually get an idea of what a good piece would be, using some of the ideas I've come up with and discarding the other 90% of crap. I then might go through this process again before I get the finished piece but the result is usually something I'm happy with, and I didn't need some burst of inspiration to come up with it. If you sit around waiting for your writer's block to fade, it never will. In my opinion, you've got to write the most when you feel uncomfortable writing. That way, you eventually get to a point where writing becomes second nature and you never suffer from any kind of mental block. I'm not there myself yet but I have noticed that the more I improve as a composer, the less I seem to suffer from writer's block. Also, when I did used to have really severe writer's block, I found that my problem was often with the beginning of the piece. Once I got the beginning out of the way, I could usually fly through the rest of it and everything would fall into place. One thing you could do, that I sometimes do myself, is take the first few bars of any piece and continue it as if it was your own piece. It takes that difficult first idea out of the equation and gives you a few things to work with. You can then take the rest of the piece that you write and come up with an entirely new piece using some of the ideas you came up with.

I'd say that now, almost anything goes in terms of harmony. The key to writing good counterpoint is more to do with good voice leading and control of tension and release than with thinking about the harmony. In terms of voice leading, you should still strive for contrary or oblique motion as often as possible and try to avoid using large leaps too often. In terms of controlling tension, it all comes down to how you space out your harmonies. Take the four notes: C, Db, D, Eb. If they were written as minor 2nds, stacked above middle C, they would sound very dissonant. But, if you were to space them out more, let's say Middle C, D in the octave above, and Db & Eb both in the octave above that, they would sound less dissonant and therefore less tense. You could honestly pick your notes completely by chance, and providing they were well spaced vertically to create a flow of tension and release, and made sense horizontally in terms of voice leading, they would sound fine.

George Freidrich Haas, Simon Bainbridge and Ben Johnston are the living composers I'm currently listening to but this changes all the time. I also don't like to think in terms of favourite composers; I think more in terms of favourite pieces of music. Even the best are capable of writing dross from time to time and vice versa.

One of the things that really bugged me when I first came across the "rules" was that nobody ever explained to me the actual musical reasons for these rules to exist in the first place. It was just a case of "Bach, Handel, Haydn etc. did it. So should you." I think it would be good to offer some explanations for the existence of each of these rules. I'll offer what I understand the reasons for each one to be. Feel free to elaborate/correct me. 1) Parallel Unisons and Ocatves: This one stems from the idea that in polyphonic vocal music, all parts were thought to be of equal importance and should therefore be equally distinguishable and individually defined. As 2 notes an octave apart are fundamentally the same note, two voices moving in parallel octaves or unison lose their independence and effectively become one voice. 2) Parallel fifths: Same reason as 1). After the unison and the octave, the fifth is the next most consonant interval. Parallel fifths have the same effect of diminishing the individuality of voices. 3) Never double the leading note: The leading note wants to resolve upwards to the tonic. If you double it, you will either find yourself with parallel octaves/unison by resolving both upwards, or one of the leading notes will have to fall a 3rd to resolve onto the fifth of the tonic chord (This kind of resolution actually happens quite often in Bach chorales when a dominant 7th chord is used at the perfect cadence to ensure that the tonic which follows contains all 3 notes of the triad. It is resolved in this way for a good reason and never because the leading note has been doubled.) 4) Never double a sharpened or flattened note: Same principal as 3). A sharpened note naturally wants to continue upwards to resolve, while a flattened note naturally wants to resolve downwards. If you double either, you run the risk of parallel octaves/unison or an otherwise poor resolution that sounds unnatural. 5) Never double sevenths/ninths: Again, this is the same principle as the previous two rules. Added notes, such as sevenths and ninths, are suspensions that naturally want to resolve downwards. Doubling will lead to parallel octaves/unison or poor resolution. 6) Melodic augmented seconds are to be avoided: I was never 100% on the reasons behind this one. These are some of the possible reasons for it that I can think of: 1. Stylistically, it sounds out of place in Western classical music (though a lot of composers have made use of it). The reason for this may have something to do with the fact that the interval isn't found in any of the ancient modes that modern tonality developed out of, so it would sound odd to ears that weren't accustomed to it. 2. Some may argue that it is enharmonically the same interval as a minor 3rd and should therefore sound okay, but before equal temperament developed (which is when most of these "rules" were actually being put into practice), enharmonic notes such as G#/Ab, or C#/Db would have actually been noticeably different in pitch from one another. So the augmented 2nd, F-G#, would sound out of tune compared to the minor 3rd, F-Ab. 7) Avoid the Augmented Fourth melodically: The interval was avoided simply because of its dissonance but this rule was observed less and less in music as time went by. It would certainly sound out of place in a Bach chorale but it has often been used melodically since then. 8) Skips larger than a sixth must be followed by a change in direction: This is just a general guideline for good melodic writing. The ideal contour for a melody should be a wave or an arch shape. This can be heard in vocal music. A vocalist naturally wants to exert energy, i.e. move upwards in pitch, towards the climax of a phrase, before resolving tension and recovering to end the phrase, i.e. descending in pitch. Another reason for turning back when specifically skipping a sixth, is that if you move a step in the opposite direction, you form a perfect fifth with the first note, so it is basically a decoration of a melodic fifth. 9) The interval of a fourth against the bass is forbidden: The interval of a fourth isn't naturally present in a triad that is formed in accordance with the harmonic series. While the fourth is viewed as a consonance (this wasn't always the case), it is only used as a consonance because it is the inversion of the perfect fifth, and therefore can't realistically be avoided. It should be avoided where possible. The really obvious exception is the 2nd inversion tonic chord that often occurs before the dominant chord in a perfect cadence. The "dissonant" effect is exploited in that case for musical reasons, with the fourth resolving to a major third in the dominant chord. 10) Dissonances such as sevenths should resolve downwards: Again, this relates to the releasing of tension, which is more naturally achieved by moving downwards rather than upwards. 11) Always double the root of a root position triad: I don't really have a reason for this one but it sounds like a good rule of thumb, though breaking it is often unavoidable so it shouldn't be worried about too much I guess. 12) I would say that if there is a 12th rule it's this: These shouldn't be thought of as rules. They are guidelines for writing successfully in a certain style from a certain era. They are necessary for any composer to know and be able to put into practice but be aware that to obtain the best musical results, every single one of these rules will need to be broken at some point or other. That's what I understand the reasons for these "rules" to be. I'm sure some others here have some insights they could add that could be of use to beginners.

I'm not entirely sure about this but if I had to tackle that first tuplet, I'd probably do something like this: As far as I understand, a 7:5 would be a septuplet within a quintuplet so you would work out the lowest common multiple of 7 and 5 which is 35. Now, imagine the tuplet is split into 35 equal parts. Every 7 parts=1 quaver of the quintuplet. Every 5 parts=1 quaver of the septuplet that is contained within the quintuplet (the actual quaver that is notated on the page.) If you look at my drawing, you can see the 35 divisions in the middle with the quintuplet quavers underneath and the septuplet quavers above. Above the septuplet quavers, I've written out the first tuplet from your example. Obviously this would be very time consuming and impractical and you would have to learn the tuplet very slowly as if it had 35 "beats", though I can imagine that over time you'd get an intuitive feel for the rhythm of a 7:5 or 5:4 or whatever and be able to get through it relatively quickly. Like I said, I'm not 100% on this; that's just how I'd go about it. Common sense tells me there is a simpler way but I don't know what it is.

I'm sure some great music could be produced by using set theory in the compositional process but I would argue that you could create the same piece of music without the set theory. For me it's like, to get to the mathematical part, you have to go through the musical part first anyway so why turn it all into math just to turn it back into music again, if that makes sense. You can still have the same level of control of interval content and consistency without it. Music is already abstract enough without abstracting it further with mathematics in my opinion. I've done it as well. I wrote a piano piece using the all-interval hexachord against it's complementary set. In the end, I found that I was largely writing exactly what I instinctively wanted to write, then attempting to shoehorn it into this set theory idea after the fact. The piece still had a certain consistency and uniformity to it because you're always going to get that from cellular or motivic development and the intuitive connections and possibilities that you see while writing anyway. Not to mention your ear, which is streets ahead of your brain when it comes to making and seeking out these sorts of connections while composing. I think I'm being too strong about this but it's probably a reaction to having to put up with professional analysts using mathematical ideas to tell me things about pieces of music that are either of no musical consequence to the listener whatsoever, or can be inferred without the aid of a mathematical idea.

Very well, I am being asinine, I'm incapable of understanding it and clearly don't fall within the target audience. I accept that. I'm only still on this thread because other people have chipped in and quoted me so I've had to respond to them.

I disagree. Not one mention of set theory in either Orientations or Boulez on Music Today. I suspect this is a case of confused nomenclature because serial and set theory aren't synonymous. You could analyse it all with set theory (and by analyse, I really mean label) but to say Boulez or Webern composed with set theory in mind is a bit of a stretch. Especially the piano sonata 1 which is from the 1940s. It predates most expositions of musical set theory by at least 20 years. Ditto Webern but even more so.

I don't understand why you've posted it on a forum for composers if, as you've already admitted, it is going to be of no use to composers. That would be like recommending a steakhouse to a vegetarian. Asinine.

Yes but were those pieces really created using set theory or adopted by analysts as examples of set theory in music so they could get a paper published? I can't speak for all of those examples but I know that Webern's Variations and Boulez's 1st piano sonata definitely were not composed with any set theory in mind. You can label certain elements in them using set theory such as the self- generating motive at the start of the Boulez or certain recurring harmonies in the Webern but you could do the same to something like Beethoven op. 131 and label every case of the augmented 2nd in its various guises and transformations and claim that he had set theory in mind when composing but that would be pointlessly anachronistic. As it happens, Babbit, Boulez and Webern are three of my favourite composers. I'm not knocking the music at all; I'm just knocking the analysts-turned-mathematicians. Thus proving my point to an even greater degree that this is a piece of vanity publishing that appeals only to a niche market of mathematicians who happen to have an interest in both group theory and music theory. If we could draw a Venn diagram, the intersection would have about 5 people in it. If only you would admit that instead of pretending that there is some grand esotericism at work that us non-initiated monkeys could never wrap our little heads around.

Look, I'm not taking anything away from the mathematical value of applying mathematical theories to music. I can believe that mathematicians may be able to find value in applying group theory to music and as you say, they may not even need any prior music theory knowledge to do so. In fact, I remember a math exercise I had to do once that involved time signatures but assumed no prior musical knowledge so I get your point, I really do. I'm just saying that it isn't of much, if any, practical use to composers. You've said it's not supposed to be. Fair enough. My last post wasn't aimed towards you; it was aimed towards someone who thinks you can use set theory to say something musically meaningful. I have tried to demonstrate that you can't. If anything, you would seem to agree with me judging by what you've just written so I don't see what the problem is, apart from the fact that I've practically derailed your thread, which I apologise for.