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I majored in flute performance in college, and have listened / played a lot of avante garde music. My roommate, a bass player, and I were really into it at the time. We once played Shoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire on a tape loop over and over for an entire week -- and emerged with our sanity mostly intact. (An interesting side fact is that now I can barely recall it.) I played Luciano Berio's Sequenza on my Sr. recital. In retrospect, I think I was mostly relishing playing the role of enfant terrible, playing weird music just to get a rise out of people.

These days I don't willingly listen to atonal music of the Shoenberg/Carter/Boulez variety. I have a variety of theories about why modern classical music tends to be rejected, but in the end, all I can really say is that I have a subjective response to, say, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, that's entirely different from his Movements for Piano & Orchestra.

Pierrot Lunaire is pre-dodecaphonic Schönberg, though. I actually find it quite charming, in a way.

Luciano Berio's Sequenza aren't traditionally considered serialist (absolutely gorgeous and stunning set of compositions BTW). Although he certainly "sounds" serialist "as a style" the same way Elliot Carter is a "serialist" even though he claims he never used it as a "technique".

I really like your point with respect to "Rite of Spring" vs his "Movements for Piano & Orchestra". But let's please note that he likely never attempted to invoke the same kind of vibe anyway, so I don't think it really proves anything. The reality is, composers used serialistic techniques for something other than what neoclassicists wanted to create. For a better comparison, compare Elliot Carter's late piano works with his first piano sonata, which he wanted to write in neoclassical style. You can see the same Carter hue (that's likely more similar to "Movements for Piano & Orchestra" than Stravinsky's "Violin Concerto") in both so it's a more direct comparison in my very humble opinion.

With respect to:

> why modern classical music tends to be rejected

I find this claim that contemporary Western classical music is irrelevant wrong. I think its cultural force is significant. I wrote more about this in HN here [1] if you care to read. But in short, just because an artistic movement inspires artists and not the audience, it doesn't mean it won't indirectly impact the audience, since artists who will go and create mainstream art may be inspired by the innovators of their era.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37424409

You ended up listening to Schoenberg at his best, and Sequenza is also a pretty good piece. As a composer and pianist/harpsichordist, my theory on this is that at some point, modern classical music became postmodern in terms of rejecting the concept of objectivity and beauty in the experience of music. That allowed composers to write truly horrible garbage with an air of superiority because "you just don't understand it" if you don't like it. This seems to have been a largely failed experiment: there are things that you can do in a piece of music that are more beautiful than other things, even if there is some subjectivity in terms of exact taste.

Ironically, the current period of music is starting to be called "postmodern" music, but it's returning a bit to the harmonic aesthetics of the romantic period (not purely, it's mixed with music from around the world as well as jazz and pop/rock ideas) and innovating more around music production technology - like adding electronics to the orchestra and experimenting with microtonal instruments - rather than trying to innovate on the concept of harmony itself. I would assume that this is in no small part due to the influence of film scoring, which is largely considered pedestrian by hardcore modernists, on the new generation of composers.

By the way, I happen to like a lot of the modernist stuff that I am rejecting here, but I think that's more out of familiarity (through study) than anything else.

> There's an argument that serialism forces composers to use those operations instead of falling back towards conventional theory. But in fact the opposite happened. It didn't take long for serial composers to start mining serialism for tonal elements.

Nothing of this sort happened except in very exceptional cases where it's very obvious and clearly intentional, such as Alban Berg (who chose adversarially tonal tone rows). Besides you assume the only benefit you get from serialism is atonality but that makes no sense because many composers used tonal rows too (i.e. tone rows with 7 or 9 pitch classes in the Major or Minor system). Not only that but different composers used serialism for different purposes.

You are however right that Schoenberg assumed 12 tone serialism implies some form of atonality, which is incorrect. Research shows that he had a bias towards atonal tone rows.

Lerdahl's criticism of serialism is also convincing, i.e. the abstract structure of music does not translate to the heard structure of music. It's fair to classify this as the "art" part of writing serialistic pieces that theory is insufficient.

Besides all of this, traditional music theory teaching focuses too much on serialism as a "technique" and not enough as a "structure", which was the main point of Schoenberg. For example, Elliot Carter claims he doesn't intentionally use row vectors or row matrices in his compositions, but his works can certainly be analyzed and understood this way. It seems like for a minor subset of free atonal compositions serialism is the natural structure of this kind of music. This point is often missed.

I firmly disagree with your points about Schoenberg. I think he's one of the two gigantic innovators of music in 20th century: Philip Glass and him. (I understand this is extremely controversial, opinions are mine). It really takes a lot to make artistic statements so profound your works look misplaced in your canon but are still firmly part of it.

>gigantic innovators of music in 20th century

I still hold out hope that someday Harry Partch will get the recognition he deserves. If traditional Western harmony is played out, surely the obvious solution is adding more notes? It makes more sense to me than trying to wring out the last few drops of novelty using Schoenberg's ideas. Partch demonstrated that microtonal works can sound both pleasant and novel, but musicians are strangely resistant to the idea.

One exception is Sevish, who produces some of the most interesting electronic dance and ambient music I've heard. Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-JZhCWsk3M

I wish more musicians would compose stuff like this.

One can also explore inharmonic timbres - the kinds of timbres that are naturally produced by cymbals, gongs, bells, drumheads etc. William Sethares has convincingly shown that one can compute inharmonic timbres that will make "weird" tunings/scales that are not based on the harmonic series sound "in tune", and usable as music. (This has to be done by minimizing a prediction of psychoacoustic "roughness" for the given tuning/scale; to some extent, it's a trial and error process.)

Oooh! Interesting. Do you know of a good resource for learning about Sethares' method?

He has a book about it - Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale. Unfortunately, I don't know of anyone who has tried to reproduce his results and make them more easily approachable for broader use, at least not thus far.

His website is a good place to start:

https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html

Ableton Live is about to release a new update with a comprehensive, well-integrated means of working in non-standard scales and custom micro-tuning. Hopefully this will lower the technical barrier to entry among contemporary musicians enough to broaden it's usage.

Ableton Live already has Microtuner (https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/microtuner/), I haven't heard it being used much though. Also, Bitwig released the Micro-Pitch device years ago.

I am curious whether a better Live integration is going to lead to more usage.

I somewhat disagree with your assessment. I don't think the next phase after traditional Western harmony is a wider adoption of microtonal music.

What we see more and more of is an increased reliance on aspects that were previously less explored in the traditional (orchestral) Western music, such as texture and rhythm. Even in academic music, but mostly in cross-genre acoustic/electronic production.

I find microtonality gimmicky

Me too. It's not a convincing direction for art music imho. This is my biggest criticism of Ligeti. I don't think he needed that detuned flute in his Violin Concerto. Otherwise love his music to my bones.

It's true that a lot of microtonal music is gimmicky, but I think that's the fault of the composers, not the tuning systems. Do you find barbershop music gimmicky? The defining feature of the genre (harmonic seventh chords) is microtonal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_seventh_chord

I'd not consider just intonation to be microtonality.

I guess it technically is? But to me it conveys something different.

For example, there's period performances of Bach pieces played in harpsichords tuned in just intonation. I'd not say that's microtonality.

Just intonation is an unusual choice for Bach's works. I'm not aware of any evidence that he used it, and he certainly thought about tuning. His "Well Tempered Clavier" was meant as a demonstration of some unknown tuning system that was more flexible than the various meantone temperaments that were common in his time. But there are approximations of meantone using just intervals, so it's certainly possible that people have performed it that way.

But this sort of just intonation is not like barbershop, because all the intervals can be tolerably approximated with 12-equal temperament. The mood of the piece will change somewhat as some become more and some become less consonant, but it will remain essentially the same work. The barbershop seventh chord cannot be so approximated. The "ringing" sound of the seventh chord that defines the genre doesn't occur unless the seventh is tuned very noticeably flat from the closest 12-equal temperament equivalent. If you arpeggiate a barbershop seventh chord it sounds obviously microtonal.

> If traditional Western harmony is played out, surely the obvious solution is adding more notes?

If traditional Western literature is played out, surely the obvious solution is to add more letters to the alphabet?

Music theory has the concept of "octave equivalence", where changing the pitch of a note up or down by an octave does not change its function. This means it's possible to enumerate all the functionally distinct harmonies available in standard Western tuning. There are 12 distinct pitch classes. One of these must be the lowest note in the harmony, so there are 11 remaining pitch classes that could optionally be included or omitted. If all are omitted it's just a single note not a harmony, so there are 2^11-1 = 2047 functionally distinct harmonies.

Most of them are of little musical utility, but you could conceivably use and have opinions about them all. This is not possible with literature. There are far more than 2047 functionally distinct sentences, so there is no need to add more letters to the alphabet.

> If all are omitted it's just a single note not a harmony, so there are 2^11-1 = 2047 functionally distinct harmonies. Most of them are of little musical utility, but you could conceivably use and have opinions about them all.

Unrelated but it reminded me of this [0] article discussed on HN a few times.

[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxepzw/musicians-algorithmic...

> If all are omitted it's just a single note not a harmony, so there are 2^11-1 = 2047 functionally distinct harmonies.

You're omitting time. Harmonic perception is highly contextual. The way a chord sounds will depend heavily on the chords that precede it, so it's not just a question of enumerating the chords. You have to enumerate the chord progressions, and their rhythms. That's a much larger number.

> Lerdahl's criticism of serialism is also convincing, i.e. the abstract structure of music does not translate to the heard structure of music.

There are ways to address this however. One can add small-scale atonal elements to an otherwise tonal work, in a way that can be understood by the ear. I think this may account for why Webern is perhaps the most popular among the atonal and serial composers: his works are small-scale enough that one can at least think about what grokking them musically may be like. Same for the 'freely atonal' works of early Schoenberg. So it was nowhere near the total failure some people might think it was, just not the be-all and end-all.

Interesting point re: technique vs structure. Structure is in general a much harder aspect to both master and innovate in.

I am curious, why do you consider Glass a more innovative composer than, say, Reich? Reich's counterpoint and phase music seem to have pushed music forward more noticeably than Glass (outside of, perhaps, Einstein on the Beach).

I don't find Reich as convincing because I don't think he was prolific enough and canonical (with respect to forms he used) enough to make the profound statement Glass was able to pull off with his Violin Concertos, String Quartets and Operas [1]. Really, I see art as a tradition and Glass managed to put WCM (mostly concertos, symphonies, quartets, operas, solo piano really...) in the most novel context since Schoenberg. Reich is a great composer, but it's a tremendously harder pursuit to innovate within the tradition rather than reject it all and restart.

Also you talk about counterpoint and incidentally early Glass sounds very contrapuntal (like early Reich) but I think a core message in Glass' body of works is that this entire bike shedding on harmony is so silly. There is so much to music beyond just pitch, and you can literally pick 4 chords and go crazy with it. He treats harmony as a solved problem. I think Reich would agree with this but I don't think his message is as profound. Think about Adams' "Harmonielehre" where he claims he wanted to combine minimalism and early 20th century harmony. The problem here I see here is that common practice harmony revolves around richness and variety. Fux himself says as much. It sounds gorgeous and new, but it doesn't go a long way to innovate anything. Although Glass' music sounds unserious, he actually tried to force himself to innovate. Which is what Schoenberg tried to do. Restrictions motivate artists to be creative.

Listen to Glass first string quartet, it was composed in 1966 before Reich's phase music.

[1] And of course his piano etudes but pianists insist they serve no pedagogical purpose, even though I still can't find someone who can actually play them well except Maki Namekawa. Roll eyes.

"There is plenty of good music left to be written in C major." - Schoenberg

I got that from Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, an accessible history of 20th century composition. I went in ready to dislike Schoenberg but I walked away pretty charmed with him. I don't enjoy listening to any of his serial pieces, but I loved the twinkly little notes that play in Zelda BOTW when you're riding your horse. I don't claim that there's a _direct_ line from 12 tone rows to that, but overall I like living in the post-Schoenberg world where I hear a lot of the "intrepid elements of atonality, pointillist riffs" that the Atlantic author points to.

Interesting distinction you make between experimental composers and those with _some_ desire to appeal to a broader audience, or at least some conventional sensibility. I think the same applies to contemporary music - while I personally find great pleasure in the moment listening to free jazz, noise, and ambient music, it is ephemeral and soon forgotten. The music that I find memorable, that truly haunts me, has elements of the experimental, but is still fundamentally melodic. My Bloody Valentine might be a good example.

> it is ephemeral and soon forgotten.

I disagree with this. Complexity is just harder to remember, it requires more attention and more iterations to remember it.

From my read of "Theory of Harmony" and "Structural Functions of Harmony", it seems to me Schoenberg definitely wasn't aiming to be a great innovator, he was desperate to be part of the great tradition and saw serialism as an inevitable consequence of the way in which tonality was being stretched further and further in particular by Wagner and Schoenberg's great hero, Mahler. Schoenberg came up with the idea of serialism because he felt there needed to be some sort of formal constraint to give structure to the music in the absence of harmony because he felt the sense of a tonic was being stretched to breaking point anyway and would inevitably fail. People came up with other ways to provide this structure once the whole serialist -> integral serialist process had worked its way through.

Saying there's nothing you can't do in serialism you can't do in free atonality seems unfair. Firstly free atonality came about after integral serialism. Secondly, there's nothing you can do in any type of musical composition that you can't do in free atonality, so you may as well say all the things you can do with functional harmony are a worthless constraint.

As for popularity - I personally don't think that's an important characteristic at all, but if you do, there are lots of serialist works that are very popular (eg Wozzeck[1]).

[1] And I deliberately chose that one rather than say Berg's violin concerto which is also very popular because that's one of the ones that you're accusing of mining serialism for tonal elements

> The case against serialism is easy.

You can make exactly the same case about tonal voice leading rules too. Rules are a "pointless conceit" by definition. "Free atonality" can, again by definition, do anything it wants, including emiting a J. S. Bach fugue or whatever. This is a tautological case.

In fact the whole point to music is rules. We have expectations about what we hear and how that works and what it means, and you write "new" music by breaking or bending just a few of them, or otherwise finding ways to do stuff other people haven't.

And Schoenberg was trying to find a way to write a new set of rules. It didn't catch on, for the most part, but it wasn't "pointless". You can hear tone rows and learn the rules and "understand" a 12-tone piece in ways that you can't for arbitrary noise. And that's kinda cool.

> You can make exactly the same case about tonal voice leading rules too.

You really can't. They aren't laws of nature, but they are based on observation: "When I have two voices proceed in parallel fifths, it's as though one voice ceased to have an independent character. Unless I want that effect, I should avoid that." "When I frustrate a leading tone, it makes the harmonic effect less clear."

Schoenberg's system starts with the arbitrary: pick a tone row and use it! But there are rules based on observation there, too: if you use tonal constructions in atonal music, it frustrates the listener's expectations, so don't do that. The ear can recognize the rows when transposed, reversed, and altered by other techniques, so those are good. Serialism is less fully-developed and lacks the deep cultural background of tonal music, but it's not entirely arbitrary either.

> "When I have two voices proceed in parallel fifths, it's as though one voice ceased to have an independent character."

This is partly true, but that rule (as with many other rules of strict composition) originated with purely vocal music which had to be made easy to sing. There's plenty of music for instruments like the piano or the guitar (even literate music, starting from the early 20th c. or so) where consecutive fifths are played all the time and such a "blending" effect is not really heard. Probably a result of timbre (these instruments have a bit of perceptual "roughness" to them that helps prevent a blended tone) as well as musical context (when consecutive fifths are just part of the music, that kind of sound is expected and easier to understand for the listener).

> Unless I want that effect, I should avoid that.

"But most of all Schoenberg was trying too hard to be remembered. Bach, Mozart, Debussy and his predecessors saw themselves as jobbing composers. They knew they had to keep at least one ear moored in audience expectations."

But weren't audience expectations tainted by the musical establishment? Debussy (born 1862) won the Prix de Rome, but somehow Ravel (born 1875, one year after Schoenberg) was snubbed for five consecutive years.

Something terrible seems to have happened in music schools around the turn of the century. It's hard to blame Schoenberg for wanting to watch it all burn.

What do you think about the application of his theory to film scores? I’m immediately reminded of Jerry Goldsmith’s work for Planet of the Apes. Extremely atonal and alien, that score is really effective at putting the audience off-balance and feeling unsettled. I love it!