A Revisionist History of Twelve-Tone Serialism in American Music

Abstract

AbstractThe history of twelve-tone serial music in the United States extends from the late 1920s to the present day. Practitioners of a distinctively American brand of twelve-tone music have included many well-known composers in three distinct waves of activity: prewar experimentation by native-born “ultra-modern” composers amid an influx of European émigrés; a postwar boom; and a third wave of twelve-tone activity since 1980. This extensive repertoire shares certain structural features, including twelve-note aggregates and serial ordering, but even these very general compositional commitments are subject to individual modification, and American twelve-tone serial music has taken astonishingly varied forms. To give an accurate account of this music's history, we must first pry away the many myths that have accreted around it. In the process, we will need to abandon historiographical models that focus on one or two “great men” and that describe the history of style as a series of changing fashions. This article proposes that we regard American music since 1925 as a dynamic steady state within which modernist styles, including twelve-tone serialism, persist as vibrant strands within the postmodern musical fabric.