Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics
Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe

A study of serial music, an important aesthetic movement in post-war Europe.

M. J. Grant (Author)

9780521619929, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 8 June 2005

284 pages, 11 b/w illus. 5 music examples
24.6 x 19 x 1.5 cm, 0.51 kg

'A rich and fascinating book.' Music Teacher

Serial music was one of the most important aesthetic movements to emerge in post-war Europe, but its uncompromising music and modernist aesthetic has often been misunderstood. This book focuses on the controversial journal die Reihe, whose major contributors included Stockhausen, Eimert, Pousseur, Dieter Schnebel and G. M. Koenig, and discusses it in connection with many lesser-known sources in German musicology. It traces serialism's debt to the theories of Klee and Mondrian, and its relationship to developments in concrete art, modern poetry and the information aesthetics and semiotics of Max Bense and Umberto Eco. M. J. Grant sketches an aesthetic theory of serialism as experimental music, arguing that serial theory's embrace of both rigorous intellectualism and aleatoric processes is not, as many have suggested, a paradox, but the key to serial thought and to its relevance for contemporary theory.

Acknowledgements
Note on the text
Introduction
Part I: 1. European culture in the post-war years
2. The isolated tone: electronic and serial music, 1945–1954
Part II: 3. Electronic music - 'chaos or order'?
4. Webern and Debussy
Part III: 5. Serial music as an aleatoric process
6. 'Das Serielle'
Part IV: 7. Music and language
8. Serial theory, serial practice - wherefore, and why?
Part V: Conclusion: Dorthin?
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Theory of music & musicology [AVA]