Unspoken Ideas and the New Serialism
(some excerpts)

I like ideas that are demonstrated but not discussed. Ideas not analyzed or explained--just patterns there for our amusement if we care to look. We find this sort of work in Kurdish rugs--both in the graphic patterns of the design and in the overall placement of color on the grid. Or in Jasper Johns' works--especially those since the early 70's. And also in my music: Adam & Eve, The Rugmaker, Solo, Lecture for Jo Kondo, etc. What's intriguing about all these types of work is that their ideas are playful, but still thoughtful. If you spend any time with the work, your exploration into the artists' play soon becomes a journey through a labyrinth to the artist's own private world. What is given up front is attractive, but it's not the whole story. You must participate in the artist's creative process in order to really discover what's going on. This is what everyone thought would happen with serial music; that we would follow the process and be rewarded. But unfortunately, the atonal aspect of serial music prevented this from happening. What strict twelve-tone serialism left us with was a small body of stylistically similar works where pitch was more or less arbitrary. But pitch is not arbitrary. It comes part and parcel with the registration, instrumental color, articulation and expression of a musical image. Pitches are the essential building blocks of musical language. And without language music cannot speak to our deeper intellect and spirit, without language it cannot freely express a wide range of human emotions, without language music becomes mere trite entertainment--just a fancy wallpaper for the bare rooms of our lives.

Now a new generation of composers is reinventing serialism. They are applying serial techniques to consonance, orchestration, melody, phrasing, rhythm, etc. This new interpretation of serialism has come out of minimalism, and the subsequent repetition and patterning music that minimalism spawned. Here, serialism is defined as putting any aspect/parameter of music into patterns, and reordering or mutating those patterns to effectively express the direction of the music. And when one effectively expresses the direction of the music via pitch and other parameters, one is creating musical language. Twelve-tone serialism was just the first baby step to the new serialism of the 21st century, comparable to Gregorian chant's first step towards the development of tonality in Western Civilization.

© 1989 Bunita Marcus

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