I was just looking over the several little tunes that I’ve posted on this site, and noted to Beth that this one was the most solid, because it was the closest to standard practice – formally, harmonically, etc. She asked if I was saying that I liked it better. I said that, no, I was just saying that I was more confident about it because I knew it was better grounded. She told me that this was just a symptom of my thinking of everything in defensive terms. And she was right.

It’s not as though I haven’t already noted that this is a problem of mine (and, to some degree, of almost everyone who aspires to be creative) – but just it clicked in my mind that this is the fundamental fallacy behind serialism. Arnold Schoenberg started writing “12-tone” works because he felt that atonality guided purely by aesthetic instinct was insufficient. Insufficient how? He put it in terms that made it sound like it was limiting on what you could write with it, because it wasn’t a method; but of course, by definition, you could write absolutely anything with it. The point of a method is not to allow you to write something – it’s to allow you to write something with confidence. Serialism was not designed to serve a purpose for the listener*; it was designed to serve a purpose for the composer, and that purpose is to make the composer feel like he’s better grounded. It might be fun to pretentiously say that some serialist has a particularly good ear – but it’s very difficult to say that a serialist has a bad ear. Because he can always say that he didn’t write it with his ears, he wrote it with a method, and you can take issue with the method if you must, but not with the composer; he at worst, was just following orders.

Grounding artistic work in accepted practice purely as self-defense is to be avoided. Whipping up some kind of impersonal “theory” to justify your work so that you can pre-empt criticism is genuinely bad artistic behavior. On the other hand, tradition and standard practice are important, and I’d like to believe that if I had the guts to let it all hang out all of the time, I still wouldn’t.** But I think there are probably a lot of artists for whom the threat of disapproval is what keeps them in line, writing valuable stuff rather than merely indulging themselves.

Artists shouldn’t spend their time building tomato armor to wear on stage; it will hamper their performance. Schoenberg built a tomato fortress and the serialists all crouched inside it, impervious to any possible tomato. Then 50 years later they peeked out and noticed that everyone had left the theater.

Right, fair enough. At the same time, it’s probably healthy to always consider the possibility that there might be some tomatoes out there. But don’t cringe and don’t think about it too much. It’s a fine line. I guess the only real answer is to spend a whole lot of time out on that stage. But even that wasn’t enough for Arnold, who had already achieved a fair bit of success and respect before he felt the chill. Some things are just that embarrassing.

* It would have been designed much differently if it had been, since it’s almost impossible for most people to hear the workings of serial techniques, even in the simplest pieces.

** Schoenberg himself is an odd case, since he did let it all hang out for a little while there, even though he was apparently quite sensitive to the vulnerability involved.