Download Joseph N. Straus, Twelve-Tone Music in America

Joseph N. Straus, Twelve-Tone Music in America (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
In 2000, Anne C. Shreffler lamented that “we desperately need, and still lack, a comprehensive
account of the enormous differences between North American and European approaches to
serialism, and indeed of American music history after 1945.”1 Her article then concludes with
this forthright call to action: “So let’s get to work: criticize the textbooks (and write better ones),
hold the journalists responsible for making accurate statements, and by all means stop the
irrational name-calling.”2
Ten years later, the old diatribes against serialism persist, but a more nuanced account of
twelve-tone music in its historical context has begun to emerge as well.3 e latest contribution
to this series of revisionist histories is Joseph N. Straus’s Twelve-Tone Music in America, which in
many ways exceeds Shreffler’s appeal for better textbooks. Rather than focus on the post-war years
alone, Straus’s study traces eighty years of twelve-tone composition in North America, beginning
in 1927 with Adolph Weiss and a circle of “ultramodern” composers including Carl Ruggles,
Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Wallingford Riegger. For Straus, these composers’ early experiments
provided the foundation for a “vigorous and unbroken tradition” (p. xviii) of twelve-tone
composition in America—one that was bolstered by the arrival of Arnold Schoenberg and other
1. Anne C. Shreffler, “e Myth of Empirical Historiography: A Response to Joseph N. Straus,” e Musical
Quarterly 84 (2000): 33.
2. Shreffler, “e Myth of Empirical Historiography,” 37.
3. Of the recent studies I will cite just two. Twelve-tone music figures prominently in several essays in e Pleasures of
Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology, ed. Arved Ashby (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester
Press, 2004), which attempts to rehabilitate modernist music by getting away from old ideologies in favor of new
(postmodern) listening strategies. Prominent among historical studies of twelve-tone music is Amy C. Beal, New
Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), which places the music in the context of Cold War politics.
Straus’s contribution falls somewhere between these two approaches: an apologia for serial music informed by
historical research and close readings of specific compositions.
voiceXchange Vol. 4, No. 1 (Summer 2010): 42–47.
ISSN: 2153-0203
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European émigré composers in the 1930s and 1940s, flourished in the 1950s and 1960s with the
adoption of serial methods by well-known figures (most notably Aaron Copland and Igor
Stravinsky) and with the pioneering work of Milton Babbitt, and that continues to evolve and
intrigue to the present day.
By documenting this steady output of twelve-tone works across eight decades, Straus
counteracts the tendency to treat serialism in the United States as a strictly post-war
phenomenon. He moreover succeeds in highlighting a number of significant composers whose
names scarcely appear in standard histories of twentieth-century music (Ben Weber and Louise
Talma come to mind) or whose careers are not immediately associated with serialism (Elliott
Carter or minimalist Michael Torke). Most importantly, Straus devotes over two thirds of the
book to the actual music of American twelve-tone composers. In doing so, he rejects the history
of serialism that allows “a small number of texts (mostly by Schoenberg and Babbitt) … to stand
for not only their music, but, what is even worse, for a highly varied musical repertoire produced
by a remarkably diverse group of composers.” (p. xxi) Indeed, the analytical close readings that
Straus performs—sensitively and with a loving attention to detail—comprise perhaps his most
valuable contributions to our understanding of twelve-tone music in America.
Each analytical vignette contained in Part One, titled “irty-seven ways to write a twelvetone piece,” addresses both the organization of pitch materials and the expressive impact that the
music might have on a sensitive listener. Such a balancing act is not always simple, nor is it
common in the literature on twelve-tone music. As Joseph Dubiel has suggested, the status of
pre-compositional structures—the framework of a musical space that the composer explores—is
often grossly exaggerated; in reality, the twelve-tone system dictates very little about the
perceptible surface.4 is apparent dichotomy between how the music “works” and how it
“sounds” is not an insurmountable obstacle (nor is it a failure of serialism), but it does require a
willingness on the part of the analyst to bounce between pre-determined structures, audible
structures, and many layers of signification that might arise between the two.
In many ways, Straus meets this challenge head on. Some of his best analyses connect the
organization of pitch material with the actual experience of listening to the music. For instance,
he sums up Babbitt’s Danci for solo guitar (1996) as follows:
is is obviously richly structured absolute music, but if one had to say what the music is
“about,” I think that it could be understood to be about memory, about the way in which
images are recalled in a fleeting, fragmentary way, their surrounding context always changing.
(p. 51)
4. Joseph Dubiel, “What’s the Use of the Twelve-Tone System?” Perspectives of New Music 35 (1997): 33–51.
Sullivan, Review of Straus | 44
is brief description captures a striking feature of Babbitt’s music—namely, the passing of
trichords or other fragmentary motives between registers and across greater spans of time. ese
fleeting echoes often arise directly from the construction of Babbitt’s arrays (or “superarrays,” as
found in Danci), but are also highlighted by the composer in a playful, virtuosic manner.
Moreover, Straus’s suggestion that this music is “about” memory fits perfectly with Babbitt’s own
obsession with the “memorative capacity” of listeners—that is, with the challenge of perceiving
and analyzing multiple levels of twelve-tone structure.5
Not all of Straus’s analyses provide such productive paths for listening to twelve-tone music,
however. His discussion of the rhythmic organization of Danci, to continue with the previous
example, shows how the intervallic content of an opening trichord (and its inversion) is projected
in the guitar’s rhythmic attacks, but never questions whether the two categories—pitch-class sets
and time-point sets—are perceived in the same way. Undoubtedly Babbitt treated the
serialization of pitch and rhythm as conceptually equivalent in constructing this work, but such
assumptions need to be scrutinized by the analyst, rather than accepted blindly as truth. At other
points in the book, Straus’s prose falls similarly short; one is left wanting to hear more—much
more—about the interaction of jazz aesthetics and serial practices in the music of Gunther
Schuller and Hale Smith, or about the poignant text setting in Roger Sessions’s When Lilacs Last
in the Dooryard Bloom’d (1964–70). at Straus’s analyses only brush the surface of these complex
and stimulating compositions is understandable, though, as the number of pieces analyzed is
considerable and the page count limited.
On the whole, Straus succeeds in demonstrating not only the longevity of American serialism,
but also the rich variety of sounds and styles that emerged from this compositional approach. For
some, the very notion that the twelve-tone method does not engender a single sound may be a
revelation. (It was for Copland, who overcame his critical view of serialism when he realized that
the technique could be divorced from the “old Wagnerian” aesthetic that he found so distasteful
in Schoenberg.6 ) Far from the old characterization of angular and dissonant music, Straus shows
how twelve-tone and serial compositions engage with neoclassical and minimalist aesthetics,
allude to tonal harmonic practice, and even find their way into film. Upon reading Straus’s
portrayal of such a vibrant repertory in Part One, my only real disappointment is that no CD
accompanies the book.
5. See Milton Babbitt, “On Relata I,” e Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, ed. Stephen Peles with Stephen Dembski,
Andrew Mead, and Joseph N. Straus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 254–55.
6. Straus cites Howard Pollack on how Copland’s attitude toward twelve-tone composition shifted in the 1950s:
“After encountering the music of Pierre Boulez while in Europe in 1949, [Copland] more fully realized that the
technique could be divorced from the ‘old Wagnerian’ aesthetic, a lesson confirmed by a growing familiarity with late
Webern as well as with the tonal twelve-tone pieces by the Swiss Frank Martin and the Italian Luigi Dallapiccola.”
Pollack, Aaron Copland: e Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999),
445–46.
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After surveying the great range of styles and techniques that American twelve-tone
composers have employed, Straus attempts to situate their music within broader theoretical and
historical contexts. “Context” takes an unusual form, however: in Part Two, titled “American
twelve-tone music in context,” Straus refutes nineteen “myths” regarding the creation, history,
and reception of twelve-tone music. Challenging some of the prevalent narratives (“myths”)
surrounding this music, he offers a more nuanced account of twelve-tone compositional practice
by allowing the music (in Part One) and the composers (in Part Two) to speak for themselves.
Straus first defines “myth” (following the Oxford English Dictionary) as “a widely held …
misrepresentation of the truth” (p. 177), and many of the myths he lists are simply that:
misconceptions that can be dismissed with little discussion. Of course serialism is not a strict
method defined exclusively by Schoenberg, nor is it necessarily opposed to tonality or pitch
repetition. Of course it is not inexpressive, unnatural, or un-American. One hopes that Straus’s
word on these counts is final.
Other myths that he addresses are more knotty, however, because they involve some deeply
embedded historiographic trends. ey are myths in a second sense, meaning “collective
ideology” or “set of beliefs.” In particular, Straus challenges the standard history of twelve-tone
music on two counts: what he calls the fallacy of the “great man” and the fallacy of stylistic
evolution. (p. 194) e first fallacy has allowed two main figures, Schoenberg and Babbitt, to
stand in for a much larger and more varied compositional practice. e second fallacy models
history as a series of stylistic trends that rise and fall, with American serialism emerging in the
post-war years and then being eclipsed by minimalism and neo-romanticism two decades later.
Implicated in both of these fallacies is also the modernist version of history that privileges
innovation and originality over all other qualities.
Straus’s criticism of these fallacies is well warranted, and it is hard to disagree with his
arguments. Of course Schoenberg and Babbitt were not the only twelve-tone composers in North
America. Of course twelve-tone music existed prior to the invention of integral serialism in the
1940s and continued long after its supposed demise in the 1970s. ese facts are indisputable.
e real issue, then, is that Babbitt is so often the sole focus in accounts of American twelvetone music: his early experiments with organizing pitch and rhythmic domains mark serialism’s
birth outside of Europe, and it is his music and writings (however misconstrued) that critics
condemned in later decades. In reality, however, Babbitt’s approach to twelve-tone composition
hardly amounts to a musical common practice—within the United States or internationally—
and Straus makes a persuasive case for treating the composer and his contributions as extremely
unique.
In debunking the “Myth of Integral Serialism,” Straus removes Babbitt and the serialization of
rhythm from the spotlight;7 in rejecting the fallacies of stylistic evolution and the “great man,” he
suggests a new history of American twelve-tone music in which serialism exists alongside
7. Indeed, integral serialism was far more prevalent in Europe than in North America, where its only practitioners are
largely Babbitt and Babbitt’s student Charles Wuorinen.
Sullivan, Review of Straus | 46
numerous other stylistic trends and Babbitt is just one of many composers adopting this
compositional approach. While this egalitarian vision would force the scholarship on twentiethcentury music in many new directions, I have to question whether it is a productive revision of
history.
One the one hand, such an approach is refreshing. By pushing aside much of serialism’s
modernist baggage (presented here as myths), Straus is able to open up space for new approaches
to this music. Accordingly, one can read an analysis of George Rochberg’s early twelve-tone music
on its own terms—that is, without recourse to the composer’s later anti-serial polemics. On the
other hand, so many of the myths that Straus cites have their origins in the writings of
Schoenberg or Babbitt (with the remaining myths largely stemming from Pierre Boulez); this fact
alone reinforces their place at the center of twelve-tone musical culture. ese figures loomed large
in the imaginations of composers and critics alike. ey were the main myth-makers,
intentionally or not, and they are inextricably linked to the modernist model of music history
that Straus is working against.8
To be clear, I am not objecting to the removal of Babbitt from the center of American twelvetone music, but rather to the idea that the myths surrounding him might somehow be undone or
reversed. In setting the record straight for serialism, Straus comes very close to detaching the
reception of this music from its history. On the contrary, I would argue that these myths, as
pernicious and misleading as they may be, are inseparable from the history of twelve-tone music;
they cannot simply be debunked and then forgotten.
Many of these myths might actually be reworked to reveal new insights into twelve-tone
music, but only if we treat myths not as lies, but rather as “explanatory fictions, higher truths” (as
Richard Taruskin refigured the modernist mythology of Stravinsky);9 if we realize that many of
these myths may have arisen from within the culture, rather than from outside it; if we employ
“myth” in a more anthropological sense—not as (mis)representations of reality, but as means for
interpreting reality or illuminating other myths. If the complex mythology surrounding Babbitt is
any indication, the reception of twelve-tone music and the generation of twelve-tone myths merit
thorough study.
In the end, Straus’s efforts to disprove “myths” do not amount to an account of the “context”
that surrounded American twelve-tone composers and informed their musical values. Rather, Part
Two is an investigation of historiography and reception; it says more about modern-day critics
and scholars than it does about the composers and their music. Frankly, I am disheartened that
Straus found it necessary to battle these myths—even if they are still prevalent today—rather
8. I would guess that Babbitt’s integral serialism became the central feature in histories of American twelve-tone
music precisely because it reinforced a modernist—and nationalist—mythology: first, the serialization of rhythm is
highlighted because it is an innovation; second, it is highlighted because Babbitt beat out his European counterparts
in developing this technique—if only by a matter of months.
9. Richard Taruskin, “Stravinsky and Us,” e Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, ed. Jonathan Cross (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 262.
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than write a compelling account of “American twelve-tone music in context” on par with his
engaging discussion of the music in Part One. We await an account of historical and cultural
contexts that is sensitive to broader issues such as composers’ aesthetics—meaning both their
compositional preferences and their ideologies informed by twentieth-century (musical) culture—
and that places American twelve-tone composers alongside their European counterparts, who are
otherwise largely absent from Straus’s study.10
ere is no telling how many new insights into twelve-tone music could spring from Straus’s
preliminary work. He has opened our eyes (and ears) to the rich and enduring tradition of
twelve-tone composition in America and set the record straight on several misconceptions about
serialism. But Straus’s study leaves much still to do, and Shreffler’s call to action stands. “So let’s
get to work: criticize the textbooks (and write better ones), hold the journalists responsible for
making accurate statements, and by all means stop the irrational name-calling.”
Erin Sullivan
University of Chicago
10. Straus admits that “European serialism is far from a monolith,” (p. 271, n. 19) but that is precisely how he treats
the European post-war avant garde, which is reduced to generalizations about the “Darmstadt School.” It is especially
shocking that a discussion of post-war serialism could fail to acknowledge the extensive interactions and influences
between North America and Europe.