Empirical Musicology Review: Serialist Claims versus Sonic Reality

Abstract

This study examines the descriptive mores of Serialism, as found in writings of leading American academics of the past half-century. A serious gap is revealed, especially between claims made for structural conditions rooted in dodecaphonic procedures and the actual kinetics of music as heard. Curious (and debilitating) ambiguities and dead ends are noted in terms used to define critical perceptual conditions in such music; some claims of significance for features of 12-tone rows in certain works are revealed as wholly irrelevant to music as sonic event. Most prominent of the writings discussed are those of

Editorial: The Evolution of Music

“…The New Music of the West has deliberately exploited the "scientific" image in employing an inventionlike approach, equating the method of strictly following a set of newly invented abstract compositional principles to mathematics (Babbitt, 2003). Such music usually violates the psycho-physiological restraints (Thomson, 2010), contributing to the public impression of its fundamental indigestibility (Lerdahl, 1992).…”