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Originally Posted by almacg
Well if Bach inverts a melody it could be said he is using a mathematical process. However, in many circumstances a melodic inversion simply will not sound correct within the laws of Bachian harmony.
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Very correct. That's because in the music of Bach's time horizontal and vertical harmony were quite strictly separate and is strongly directed in one specific timeline. (However, Bach of course -did- use inversions or retrogrades, if he managed to devise his themes in a way that they would allow such handling.)
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With serialism however, there is no right or wrong, an inversion would not be a result of a composers calculations and his ear. It is a huge leap of faith to even begin to accept any of the resulting harmonies as being aurally intentional.
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Now this is where you are wrong. First of all, one fundamental idea of this epoch was to melt horizontal and vertical harmony and this doesn't just apply to the second Viennese school, but as well to Satie, Debussy and many more. But the fact that there isn't a clear
harmonic direction doesn't mean the harmonies are arbitrary. Guess why Webern wrote so little his whole life and never managed to write a long piece (which he desperately wanted to be able to)? Because he brooded over every note, over every chord for hours, days, or longer and wanted to be absolutely sure they were the "correct" ones. If using the inversion of a tone row at a certain point just "didn't fit" for his ears, he would have either not used the inversion there, changed the tone row and started the piece again, arranged the inversion horizontally and vertically in ways that it would fit again (by means of rhythm, voice-leading, density, registers, etc.) and so on. I think Webern is the -least- composer who could be accused of "not writing by ear",
even if he used very strict systems. The same of course applies to Schönberg and Berg, only that they were a bit more "generous" when composing and thus also were able to write a lot more.
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If I took a tonal piece, and transposed the melody up a semi-tone we would know it to be wrong. If I did this with a serialist piece, would we really know? (assuming we hadn't heard it before)
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Well, first of all "serialist" is a mere technique and says nothing about how it is used. You could have a computer produce a serial piece and then, yes, we might not notice if there were "errors" in it. But you'd certainly notice it in a piece by Webern or Schönberg, a s some effects would be created which those composers always consciously avoided: There would be octaves (that's a -major- thing they avoided in most cases), there might be cumulations of certain notes, there might be some very tonal sounding passages, there might be some clumsy voice-leading, and there might simply be notes that don't make any structural sense whatsoever (and you can be sure that in a 12-tone piece by Webern -every- makes sense structurally, every interval is derived from other intervals in the piece and so on). So my answer is
depending on the composer you'd know whether it's "wrong".
I can only repeat myself: I have -often- listed to aleatoric music where the notes are pretty random and arbitrary. It sounds -nothing- like a piece by Webern or later Boulez. There -are- some serialist pieces that would sound quite similar, but this depends entirely on
how the composer uses these techniques. Remember, 12-tone composition isn't a very rigid system, it still leaves most decisions up to the composer (whereas something like renaissance counterpoint might pretty much be called "algorithmic composition").
The serialist music of the fifties indeed is more "algorithmic" again, but the difference is that every composer defined the rules for every piece and they didn't just use a global system. Thus, they had to make very conscious musical choices in deciding what structures to use and in what way. Don't underestimate the inner (and "outer") ear of composers like Boulez.
Jun 6 2008, 2:51 AM
Oh...
Linear Mode
