Material and History in the Aesthetics of ‘Serielle Musik’

Attempts to promote the aesthetic prestige of serial and post-serial music were grounded in theories of material and philosophies of history. As composers explored new aspects of sound and subjected these to rational organization, they saw themselves pushing history forward, with new musical materials providing physical evidence for each new stage of progress. The continual search for new material fashioned a thread that bound together vastly different personalities, and similar ideas about material and history linked a diversity of approaches to, and reactions against, serialism. Believing themselves to be renouncing a subjectivity made untrustworthy by the recent past, many post-war composers turned to something larger to guide their compositional decisions: to the objective dictate of historical progress. Such deference to a fictitious construction of history veiled subjective aesthetic preferences and provided a way to legitimate new techniques with the authority of ‘higher laws’. This article reconsiders post-war serialism in central Europe from the perspective of theories of material and examines how these theories coupled aesthetic and social concerns with philosophy of history to justify compositional techniques

Aesthetics · Art · Deference · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Musical · Prestige · Sociology · Subjectivity · Visual arts · Diverse Musicological Studies · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

• Cinema and the Arts

  Open Access•Raquel Patriota•Novos Estudos - CEBRAP•2022

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