The myth of serial "tyranny" in the 1950s and 1960s

Musical Quarterly

Volumn 83, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 301-343

  Straus, Joseph N ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049415092     PISSN: 00274631     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/mq/83.3.301     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. Glenn Watkins, Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer, 1988), 528
2. Alex Ross, "Atonal, of Course, but Deep Down He's Got Rhythm," New York Times, 6 June 1993
3. Terry Teachout, "The New Tonalists," Commentary, December 1977
4. Eric Salzman, Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 138-39
5. Charles Wuorinen, Simple Composition (New York: Longman, 1979), 3
6. See, e.g., Robert Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music (New York: Norton, 1991)
7. Watkins, Soundings; Bryan Simms, Music of the Twentieth Century: Style and Structure (New York: Schirmer, 1986)
8. and Elliott Antokoletz, Twentieth-Century Music (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1992)
9. For two recent full-length arguments against serialism, see Nachum Schoffman, From Chords to Simultaneities: Chordal Indeterminacy and the Failure of Serialism (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990)
10. and William Thomson, Schoenberg's Error (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991)
11. The relationship of serialism to a cold-war fascination with science and resistance to mass culture is explored in Martin Brody, "'Music for the Masses': Milton Babbitt's Cold War Music Theory," The Musical Quarterly 77, no. 2 (1993): 161-92
12. See also William Brooks, "The Americas, 1945-70," in Modern Times: From World War I to the Present, ed. Robert Morgan (London: Macmillan, 1993), 309-48
13. The textbooks cited in note 6 above do generally offer balanced accounts of the era. They feature serialism among postwar musical developments because of its novelty and intrinsic interest but generally do not overemphasize the extent or pervasiveness of its influence. For additional balanced accounts, see Brooks, "The Americas, 1945-70" and Arnold Whittall, Music Since the First World War (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1977)
14. Standard reference works include The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1986)
15. Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 8th ed., rev. Nicholas Slonimsky (New York: Schirmer, 1992)
16. and The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, ed. Don Randel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). Information provided by these reference works and contained in contemporary reviews was supplemented by personal communications from Joseph Dubiel, Leo Kraft, Robert Morris, Jeff Nichols, and David Olan. In gathering data for this study, I also had assistance from Elizabeth Player and Jamuna Samuel
17. George Rochberg, quoted in K. Robert Schwarz, "In Contemporary Music, a House Still Divided," New York Times, 3 August 1997
18. Donal Henahan, "And So We Bid Farewell to Atonality," New York Times, 6 January 1991
19. Susan McClary, "A Response to Linda Dusman," Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 2 (1994): 149
20. David Denby, "The Trouble with Lenny," New Yorker, 17 August 1998
21. K. Robert Schwarz, "A Regional Favorite Gains Prominence," New York Times, 1 November 1998
22. Elliot Forbes, A History of Music at Harvard to 1972 (Cambridge: Harvard University Department of History, 1988)
23. Anthony Tommasini, "When Bernstein Saw the Future," New York Times, 22 July 1998
24. Luther Noss, A History of the Yale School of Music, 1858-1970 (New Haven: Yale School of Music, 1984). The dates in parentheses are dates of service
25. Michael Beckerman, "Tonality Is Dead, Long Live Tonality," New York Times, 31 July 1994
26. Anthony Tommasini, "Finding Still More Life in a 'Dead' Idiom," New York Times, 6 October 1996
27. Winthrop Sargeant, "Is Music Dead?" New Yorker, 11 May 1968
28. Peter Gelb, "One Label's Strategy: Make It New, but Make It Pay," New York Times, 22 March 1998. Gelb is the president of Sony Classical
29. John Rockwell, All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 18
30. K. Robert Schwarz, "In Contemporary Music, a House Still Divided."
31. Winthrop Sargeant, "Musical Events: The Dead Hand of the Present," New Yorker, 27 August 1966
32. See, e.g., James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)
33. Its index contains only two references to music (one to Woodstock and one to acid rock), with a note "See also Rock 'n' roll." Similarly, Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (New York: Basic Books, 1977), makes no reference at all to any American composer in the Western classical tradition and a single reference to Stravinsky (recalling the riot at the premiere of the Rite of Spring) but devotes ten pages to the Beatles and twenty to Bob Dylan
34. Harold Schonberg, "Splitting the Octave," New York Times, 17 June 1956
35. Edward Downes, "Records: Contemporary Americans," New York Times, 13 January 1957
36. Howard Taubman, "Exit the Fifties: A Synthesis of Ideas Marked the Decade," New York Times, 13 December 1959
37. Howard Taubman, "Between 20 and 35: Roll-Call of Young Composers in U.S. Makes an Impressively Long List," New York Times, 4 August 1957
38. Harold Schonberg, "Where Are They? U.S. Has Much Compositional Activity, but Young Generation Lacks Power," New York Times, 17 January 1962. In this and all subsequent quotations, the italics are mine
39. Eric Salzman, "Recordings: Stockhausen Explained," New York Times, 25 February 1962
40. Everett Helm, "No Sensations at I.S.C.M. Festival," New York Times, 23 June 1963
41. Harold Schonberg, "Largely Ignored: The Avant-Garde Is Very Busy, but Is Scorned by the Establishment," New York Times, 13 September 1964
42. Harold Schonberg, "Future of the Symphony," New York Times, 24 October 1965
43. Harold Schonberg, "The New Age Is Coming," New York Times, 14 January 1968
44. Donal Henahan, "Current Chronicle," The Musical Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1968): 83
45. Paul Horsley, "For an Early Post-Modernist, a Day of Overdue Vindication," New York Times, 12 July 1998
46. John Rockwell, "Signs of Vitality in New Music," New York Times, 10 February 1980
47. Beckerman, "Tonality Is Dead, Long Live Tonality."
48. Richard Taruskin, "Letter to the Editor," New York Times, 27 July 1997
49. Dana Gioia, "Let's Review," New York Times Book Review, 24 January 1999, 12
50. I discuss Stravinsky's serial turn in "Babbitt and Stravinsky under the Serial 'Regime,'" Perspectives of New Music 35/2 (1997): 17-32
51. Richard Taruskin, "Does Nature Call the Tune?" New York Times, 18 September 1994
52. Taruskin, "Does Nature Call the Tune?"
53. Julian Lloyd Webber, London Daily Telegraph, 7 February 1998
54. Taruskin, "Calling All Pundits."