Conference Agenda

The year 2023 marks one hundred years since Arnold Schoenberg completed his Suite for Piano, op. 25, the first work in which he used the same twelve-tone row throughout all the movements of a single multi-movement piece.Though he and others, including Josef Hauer and Herbert Eimert, had been working with serial ideas earlier, it is undeniable that with this work a row of twelve tones “related only to one another,” as Schoenberg wrote, became an important organizing principle for generations of composers. This session seeks to mark this anniversary with six papers that look at the variety of approaches to serialism that emerged in North America and Europe in the decades that followed.

What ties these papers together is not merely serialism, but source documents as well. As a practical matter, it would seem difficult to generate a serial composition without some pre-compositional material. It is from these sources, now stored in archives (public and private), that we not only learn more about the compositions upon which they are based, but also on alternative paths that composers may have taken, on how serial thinking and procedures led to artistic development, and on how serialism influenced compositional pedagogy.

The first presentation addresses how serialism was understood and taught by Walter Piston at Harvard University in the 1940s and 1950s. The second paper delves into sources related to works by Norma Beecroft, Bruno Maderna, and Anton Webern to show their development of serial material into musical gestures that become perceptible features of the compositional surface. The third presentation discusses Roberto Gerhard’s unique serial practice as evidenced by the composer’s notebooks housed in the Roberto Gerhard Archive, as well as the contents of a personal archive of materials. The next two presentations discuss source materials for two women composers, Elisabeth Lutyens and Kaija Saariaho, describing their serial practices in the 1960s and the 1980s, respectively. The final presentation considers serial procedures by Berio, Boulez, Lutosławski, and others who contributed compositions in 1976 for a set of twelve commissions for solo cello by Mstislav Rostropovich, organized in honor of Paul Sacher’s seventieth birthday.

For a prominent American composer and pedagogue who wrote serial music and taught several students who primarily composed serial music, Walter Piston gets dismissed or completely ignored in recent histories of serialism. For example, Piston is not mentioned in John Covach’s chapter on twelve-tone music in the Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (2000) and is treated contradictorily in Joseph Straus’s Twelve-Tone Music in America (2009). Though Piston is best known today as the teacher of famous students like Elliott Carter and Leonard Bernstein, the truth is that Piston studied, experimented with, published articles about, and composed serial music. Archival documents detail this extensive interest and illustrate Piston’s creative and pedagogical credo: “The only rules worth stating are those we deduce by observing the practice of composers” (Piston, 1958, 47).

My paper focuses on three documents pertaining to Piston’s interest in serialism. The first is a sketch page from Piston’s earliest serial piece, the Chromatic Study on the Name of BACH for organ written in 1940, which shows the original row made up of the BACH tetrachord and its transposition, further transformations, and then three attempts at an opening phrase. The second document is a page from Piston’s compositional notebook from the 1950s, reflecting his study of techniques by Josef Matthias Hauer and how they could be transformed into four different compositional textures. The third document is a lesson plan used in a Harvard composition/theory class in 1956–57 that demonstrates how Piston taught serial techniques through compositional exercises. Taken together, these documents, along with excerpts from Piston’s works and writings, show that far from being a footnote to Piston’s works and teaching, serialism was a career-long attraction. Not only are they insightful for understanding Piston’s own compositions, but they also shed light on the ways he taught the technique at Harvard. Because serialism was seldom included in contemporary theory textbooks at the time, these documents fill a lacuna about how the topic was taught and reveal how Piston aggregated materials from various sources for his theory and composition courses in the days before it became a mainstream topic.

Serialism is often portrayed as a constricting system (Adorno 2006, Boehmer 2015). This paper argues, however, that archival materials document quite the opposite: serial procedures are set up with the goal of opening up new possibilities, sometimes beyond what a composer would have imagined otherwise. I illuminate this practice of creative discovery through an analysis of the construction of musical gesture in the compositional process. My examples focus on historical moments when the inspirational power of serialism is particularly evident, namely when a composer’s gestural language undergoes a significant shift as the result of novel ways of using serial techniques.

In line with the definition of gesture by Robert Hatten (2004) as “energetic shaping through time” and Arnold Schoenberg’s (2006) concept of “gestalt,” I identify gesture as a distinct unit of motion that has inner cohesion and distinguishes itself, and is demarcated, from other units. How the cohesion and differentiation work depends on all aspects that characterize this structure, including articulation, rhythm, pitch contour, dynamics, and timbre. Gestures are perceived independently of their (often obscured) serial origin; by examining the association between gesture and serialism, this paper sheds light on the relationship between the musical surface and the underlying constructive principles. Examples are drawn from works by Norma Beecroft (b. 1934), Bruno Maderna (1920–1973), and Anton Webern (1883–1945):

(1) In his drafts for the opening of the second movement from Piano Variations op. 27 (1936) Webern developed ever shorter gestures through temporal realignment of the tone rows until he found the extremely compact gestures he ultimately used and which marked a new stage in his late style. (2) A breakthrough in the gestural language of the integral-serial music of Maderna occurred when he first discovered in the String Quartet (1955) how to stratify his serial arrays into divergent rhythmic layers, blurring the distinction between melody and harmony. (3) The gestures of Beecroft’s serial music changed significantly around 1960 under the influence of her studies with Maderna and Goffredo Petrassi, without her music sounding like theirs.

Catalan composer, Roberto Gerhard (1896–1970) studied music composition with Arnold Schoenberg from 1923 to 1928, and while he learned the twelve-tone method and even composed a serial wind quintet at the end of his studies, he did not embrace the twelve-tone method or deliberately use serial techniques again until the 1950s, a full decade after his exile to England during the Spanish Civil War. As such, his approach to serial composition during the 1950s and 1960s is markedly different from that of his teacher and his contemporaries. He experimented with a variety of pitch-based techniques, created new ways to serialize temporal elements, and wrote prolifically about these developments in his personal notebooks and in various print publications. For example, in 1956, Gerhard wrote that while the “twelve-tone technique has been instrumental to achievements of the highest order … it cannot in itself be regarded as having reached its full growth in the works of Schoenberg and Webern … . On purely systematic grounds it stands, on the contrary, in need of further development.” In this presentation, I examine Gerhard’s writings, compositions, and other documents to explore how he further developed his teacher’s method. Drawing on the composer’s many notebooks in the Roberto Gerhard Archive at Cambridge University Library, as well as the contents of a personal archive of materials that belonged to the late Welsh composer, Hilary Tann, I will illustrate how Gerhard expanded Schoenberg’s method to include the serialization of non-pitch elements in Symphony no. 3 “Collages” (1960), Hymnody (1963), and other works from this period. There is little to no published scholarship on these works, and while the contents of the personal Tann archive do not reveal any definitive answers, they serve as an analytical point of entry that, when combined with Gerhard’s notebooks, provide some of the only existing information about these pieces outside of the scores themselves. Thus, by examining such materials along with more recent research on the composer’s serial works, one can discover more about Gerhard’s expansion of Schoenberg’s method and one student’s approach to twelve-tone composition and serialism during the 1950s and beyond.

Elisabeth Lutyens was a pioneer of British musical modernism who, in her Chamber Concerto no. 1 (1939), became the first British composer to employ serial techniques. By the 1960s, Lutyens had developed a unique serial idiom, her attachment to serialism earning her the nickname, “Twelve-tone Lizzie.” Historical musicologist, Annika Forkert, positions Lutyens’ oeuvre as the pivotal connection in British music history between the English pastoralism of the early twentieth century and the later Manchester School (2017, 271).

In this presentation I will examine the poiesis of Lutyens’ serialism through score analysis and study of the sketches for a variety of Lutyens’ works in her distinctive serial style of the 1960s, including: In the Temple of a Bird’s Wing (1957/1965), Présages (1963), The Valley of Hatsu-Se (1965), Akapotik Rose (1966), And Suddenly It’s Evening (1966), and The Numbered (1967). This study builds on a growing body of music-theoretical research on this important but understudied figure, which includes the work of Parsons (1999, 2003, 2005, 2016), Cole (2021), and Straus (2022).

The first half of the study presents score analyses utilizing standard post-tonal theories, centering on row structure, serial ‘anomalies’ (repetition, rotation, re-ordering), patterns between rows, texture, and the relationship between serial and non-serial techniques. In the second part I will undertake a systematic examination of the primary sources from the rich collection of sketches, row charts, drafts, and autographs. I will then compare and contrast my score analyses with the results of my sketch study to assess how the two approaches inform one another.

In summation, this presentation aims to uncover the creative process behind Elisabeth Lutyens’ distinctive and innovative serialism of the 1960s.

Little of Kaija Saariaho’s musical aesthetic seems to bear any resemblance to serialism, yet the composer nevertheless lists “serial thinking” among the techniques that have left a trace on her “musical imagination” (Lochhead 2022). In this paper, I explore the fraught and little-discussed relationship between Saariaho’s early compositional practice and the serial techniques that she encountered under the tutelage of Paavo Heininen, Brian Ferneyhough, and Klaus Huber. Drawing on pedagogical materials and drafts of student works housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, I show that Saariaho’s early engagement with serialism was at once rigorous and highly idiosyncratic. This historical context provides the ground for a reassessment of the familiar narrative that, following her encounters in the early 1980s with French spectral music and IRCAM’s computer programs, Saariaho rejected serial abstraction in favor of more “perceptible” models (Saariaho 1994, 9). I conclude by discussing the lingering influence of serial strategies on her mature compositional aesthetic, with important ramifications for the so-called “post-spectral” style, more broadly.

Three pieces form the core of this analysis: Yellows (1980 [unpublished], horn and percussion), Im Traume (1980, cello and piano), and Sah den Vögeln (1981, soprano ensemble and live electronics). Sketch materials show that each of these compositions engages in critical and distinctive ways with serial methods of organization, employing compositional tools such as matrices, systematic rhythmic permutations, and the use of abstract numeric series to control musical parameters. Building on this, I show that many facets of her compositional practice throughout the 1980s and 1990s continue to recall the practical and aesthetic aims of serialism, such as a careful isolation and control of parameters and an employment of “matrices” to define processes of interpolation and spectral manipulation (Saariaho 1984). Considering recent efforts to grapple with the stylistic plurality of “post-spectral” composition (Clift 2022, Everett 2022) and Saariaho’s position as one of its earliest exemplars, this paper reveals an important thread of influence within the tapestry of Western, post-tonal music. By centering on this little-known part of Kaija Saariaho’s career, unexpected points of juncture are established between the seemingly irreconcilable aesthetics of serial and spectral practice.

In 1976, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich organized a set of twelve commissions for cello in honor of music philanthropist Paul Sacher’s seventieth birthday. The commissions were an opportunity to mix and match a variety of composers––some closer to Rostropovich, others to Sacher––as a reflection of Sacher’s generosity. The result was a set of twelve compositions that embody a host of cultural forces: a microcosm of history, the musical style(s) of serialism, and the power of Sacher’s financial support.

Building on past work by scholars such as Carone 2008, Lessing 1991, and McCormick 2000, my research explores various materials from the Paul Sacher Stiftung, including the available sketches for each work, related correspondence about these works, and comparative trends between them. The Hommages feature the work of composers as diverse as Berio, Britten, Dutilleux, Ginastera, Holliger, and Lutosławski (among others). All of these composers were encouraged to use Sacher’s name as a serial or thematic base for their compositions (Es-A-C-H-E-Re, or Eb, A, C, B, E, D). In my paper, I focus on a few examples from the archive to highlight commonalities and differences among the commissioned artists. In summarizing various compositional strategies, I celebrate how approaches to serialism broke free from a “totalizing” philosophy in ways that sustained its underlying utility for a variety of composers with a diversity of musical affects.