Quote:
Originally Posted by demonic_advent
No. I do not hate fugues at all. There is sense and order in fugues. There is nothing but purposely flouting all standard senses of music in 12-tone theory.
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If you can't hear sense and order in pieces by, say, Webern you obviously have never really listened to them... And it's not about "purposely floating all standard senses of music" (aside from the fact that the term "standard senses of music" is highly dubitable). Contrary to popular belief the 12-tone system wasn't just "made up out of the blue", but is merely an attempt to formalise a kind of very expressive music that had developed for quite some time, to structurize it.
The point why I brought up fugues, is that they are clearly much more "mathematical" than dodecaphonic music. The compositional freedoms in 12-tone music are generally greater than the freedoms in a fugue, which is very much determined by strict rules. Both are highly structured systems, both only serve the music in the end. It (partly) is the beauty of the structure we enjoy, both in a Bach fugue and a piece by Webern.
(True serialist music, as it appeared in the fifties is of course a slightly different matter, as it is much more goverened by strict rules than Schoenbergs 12-tone music. However, even there
deciding on the musical rules is a highly individual process.)
And your example of why Schoenberg's music is random astounds me: Purposefully evading tonality is random? How can a purpose be random? If Schoenberg had wanted to write random sounding music he clearly would have used dice, right? I have several times listened to actual random music (written with dice, computer algorithms etc.), and I assure you, it sounds nothing like Schoenberg.