Like some others on the 300-million-headed-hydra of hysteria known as Twitter, I was mildly irked on April 26 when the Columbia University linguist and New York Times op-ed writer John McWhorter published an essay titled “Classical Music Doesn’t Have to be Ugly to be Good.” Citing two recent books, McWhorter argues, among other things, that serialist or twelve-tone music offers “nothing of beauty, sequence, or proportion.” He adds that after listening to a work by Luciano Berio, “I felt…forced to at least entertain the possibility that classical music had nowhere to go but ugly after a certain point.”
Follow the debate on contemporary classical music today, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the most prominent serialists—especially the post-World War II composers Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen—have had a chokehold on our collective musical imagination for centuries. (John Adams, who studied composition in the 1970s and is probably the most performed American classical composer, still styles himself as a brave rebel against the excesses of European-style serialist pretension.)
In fact, the serialists did dominate the musical scene in the 1950s and early 1960s, with longer tails in musical academia. For the record, I believe this, in the cases of Stockhausen and Boulez, had at least as much to do with their undoubted charisma and deep psychosexual need for veneration and power as it did with their tone-row methodology. In any case, by 1968, Stockhausen had composed his prettily new-age “Stimmung” for six voices in simple overtone proportions, and Boulez was conducting “Parsifal” at Bayreuth. Even if you buy the premise that all serial music is ugly, its reign was neither as long nor as brutal as you’d think from the fact that we’re dissing the genre in 2022.
More to the point, it’s simply false that serial music has “nothing of beauty, sequence, or proportion” (or that those are the only things that matter, but that’s a whole other can of worms). Of course, many serialist compositions are terrible. But many galant-style compositions are terrible, too. In this playlist, I’ve gathered eight unambiguously gorgeous serialist works.
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