Total Serialism
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- Опубликовано: 17 окт 2024
- A brief introduction to total serialism. Featured is Milton Babbitt's Three Compositions for Piano, No. 1 (just the first 4 measures).
Milton Babbitt footage - • MILTON BABBITT Portrai...
Arnold Schoenberg footage - • Gershwin films Schoenberg
Thanks for this. I can't say I'm a fan of Babbitt, I'm an Elliot Carter man myself but Babbitt's approach to serializing duration seems rather simplistic to me. Do you have any videos on Boulez? I think he went further with this idea.
Hello, I see an error in the score. In the second compass, Bb is incorrect, it would have to be B, since the original series contains it. It must be an error of the edition. Sorry for my English, I just used google translator.
i was confused about that! thanks for pointing it out
I like Total cereal. I eat it for breakfast frequently.
Lmao van beethoven
I'm not sure Webern ever really serialized non-pitch elements of his compositions. What he did was use instrumentation and register to underline patterns already present in the the pitch material of a piece.
Is the background music of the newsreel second Viennese School as well?
There are two meta-issues with serialism as a musical movement. The first is that Schoenberg, while a political conservative and musical nationalist, was also a Hegelian who believed that serialism was historically inevitable and that today we'd all be whistling 12-tone pop tunes. The Marxian music critic Theodor Adorno took it further and linked serialism (dodecaphonic democracy, in Thomas Pynchon's pithy phrase) to socialism, both of which did not turn out to be historically inevitable. People tend to gloat at this.
The second is that, quite independently of the Second Viennese School, Germanic Late Romanticism and its underlying functional harmony had become quite exhausted by the end of WW2 and for all the reasons the modernists, serialist and otherwise, laid out.
So people's anger at / smugness about the failure of serialism to usher in a new musical hegemony is quite misplaced. It's not like concertgoers were clamoring for the second coming of Rachmaninov, either. Serialism became _a_ style and not _the_ style and that's fine. Enjoy it or not to taste.
Hello! great video! I am currently doing a project on Milton Babbitt and his total serialism. I have to present about it and I'm still somewhat confused. So is total serialism just the way the 12 pitches are organized? plz help! Thanks!
It goes: pitch, duration, timbre, dynamic. Schoenberg covered pitch only. Also something called Klangfarbe Melody concerning timbre changes alone. Weberns scope of reduction was so marked as to reduce actual durations of pieces severely. Robert Crafts recording of the Complete works of Weberns comes in at a little under an hour. Finally, with Babbitt we have total serialism, followed by aleoteric and random chance of the 1960's.
Hi Sean, what do you mean by the P0 is now called P10? What is the new way of naming it? I am writing an essay about it and I saw articles that use either way to name the row which is really confusing. Do you have any links or website that explains it?
Qu Zheng Great question! I suppose you’re right that this is less a matter of old vs. new, but more simply a matter of two ways of labeling rows.
One way is to name the first row of the piece (or some other significant row) P0 and then base all other labels as transpositions of that. So the P0 row transposed by a tritone would be P6.
The other, and my preferred way, is to label P and I rows by their starting pitch. So a P row that starts on B-flat will always be P10 (or Pt, or Pa, if you use a system that replaces 10 and 11 with t and e, or a and b).
Hi Sean, thank you for the reply! I still don't understand the second method of labeling. So why the P row that starts on B-flat will be P10 instead of P0? Is P0 or P10 the prime row?
Some labeling systems always call the first row of the piece P0. Others label P forms of the row by whatever the first pitch happens to be. So in the former system, you'd call it P0, and in the latter, P10. They're both the same row, just with different labeling systems.
Hi Sean, do you mean that the P0 in the video is not the prime row, but as it is the first row, it will be called the P0 in the old system. Thank you!
Excellent tutorial, thanks much!
wow....I had not realized how complex this was. Schoenburg was a genius
TheApostleofRock Thanks for the comment!
12-tone music is pretty complicated from a compositional point of view, but anymore so than the rules that govern tonal counterpoint. Total serialism, however, was not something that Schoenberg had intended. Webern played with the idea, but Babbitt really ran with it, even using some of the first computers and synthesizers to help him create rows.
A great artist - sure. Genius? The only reason this stuff is still taught is the fact that musicians are so bad at math. Atonal music is based on specious reasoning. The idea that the 12 tones can be treated equally is FALSE. Why? because music itself does not exist on the page or outside of time. You ONLY hear sound in the present and predicated on what you just heard. In order to AVOID tonic/dominant relationships "atonal" composers have to choose adjacent intervals of: tritone, major 2nd/9ths a whopping 55% of the time. That is quite hierarchical. (this via a computerized count by Wendy Carlos who so sorry was quite a bit better at math and physics than Schoenberg) If what floats your boat is avoidance of any semblance of tonality simply divide the octave into say 11 steps instead of 12. Done.
it's illusion of complexity it is literally just playing random notes until you find something decently nice
@@goldenthunder1166 true
@@edwardgivenscomposer Well except this implies that pentatonic music can't be tonal, and every kid who plays blues licks in his basement on guitar knows that certainly isn't true. Octatonic and whole-tone music can be tonal without functional harmony, just ask Stravinsky.
Brilliant Stuff Sean!
Great job. Thanks for sharing. Best regards.
*Shorwtly after the worwh, nuwh compohsers began taking the flame that Anton Webern had starhted, and starhted crreating tohtal seriawl compositions. One such composer Milton Babbitt, seen heahr. . .*
Thanks for the translation into english.
thanks for the help !
Bravo!
This was meant to be the music of modernity & the future. Yet as I look around me, I see nothing of the sort. Hardly anyone is interested in this sort of music. I myself do listen to it, as I feel it represents a period of cultural history. But hardly anyone else is interested or will ever be interested. I wish music did not move in this direction. All we have is popular music now as music as an art form has lost relevance to most people, except as museum culture.
Very interesting and done with good humour (I'm British!) but when did P-0 become P10? Is the political correctness gone mad??
Thanks! And I know, my fake accent was all over the place.
I think this just more of a preference in labeling, akin to the difference between movable do and fixed do in tonal music.
Please stop the lie that webern ever serialized anything but pitch.