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CHAPTER 1

From Composition to Theory

I became a music theorist in order to find solutions to compositional issues. After some early success as a composer, at the age of twenty-six I hit a prolonged creative block. My first publishable pieces had been composed in a largely intuitive manner, supplemented by basic motivic and intervallic techniques. Figure 1.1 gives the beginning of Wake (1968), for soprano and chamber ensemble. All the pitches in the melody belong to one of the two all-interval tetrachords, marked on the lower staff by brackets. The accented notes at syllable onsets form the identical tetrachord class, shown by the stemmed notes. The intervallic cell is nested within itself. Already I was beginning to think hierarchically. Yet these intervallic relations seemed insufficient and ad hoc. I sought a more comprehensive way to proceed.

Looking to famous composers of the day — that is, of the 1960s — deepened my uncertainty. Elliott Carter was composing very complicated music that made sense in a broad dramatic way but not in its details. Pierre Boulez, after years of presuming to dictate the future of music, was spending most of his time conducting while his own music narrowed in scope and expression. Iannis Xenakis's stochastic methods did not provide enough meaningful distinctions. Luciano Berio's music was talented but weakly structured. Karlheinz Stockhausen had gone through so many phases that I could no longer take him seriously. The scene was confusing and dispiriting.

Milton Babbitt, the dominant figure at Princeton when I studied there, had provided a close-up model of what it could mean to compose with a system. But his serial system was opaque to perception. Why compose by a hidden code that could be deciphered only with difficulty, and why pretend that musical relations resulting from it were, as he claimed, significant? He tried to support the claim with scientific rhetoric borrowed from logical positivism, a school of philosophy concerned with empirical criteria for the verification of scientific propositions. To say that something is significant, however, is to make a value judgment, and value judgments were of peripheral interest to logical positivists. Babbitt's claims of significance rested instead on an unspoken syllogism that combined historical valuation with technical progress: (1) Schoenberg was a significant composer who had developed a revolutionary method of composition; (2) Babbitt systematized and generalized the method; (3) therefore, Babbitt inherited Schoenberg's significance.

The argument did not convince me. Babbitt's translation of Schoenberg's culturally situated serial practice into abstract operations along multiple musical dimensions was a huge leap that shed aesthetic interest and perceptual coherence. Nor could I believe in the idea that artistic significance depended on historical inheritance and innovation. Was Schoenberg a great composer because he took necessary historical steps in the evolution of tonality and post-tonality? Schoenberg may have thought so, but I did not. For me, Schoenberg's music stood or fell on its own merits. I denied the historical necessity and significance of Babbitt's system and resultant music. Yet I too became a composer-theorist, albeit of a different kind. Sometimes our greatest influences come from those we reject. Babbitt's influence on me was twofold: on the negative side, an awareness of how I did not want music to be; on the positive side, a powerful example of thinking music through, boldly and systematically, from the bottom up.

In my compositional crisis I felt cornered in two ways. On the one hand, there were diverse and largely incompatible musical styles to choose from, yet I found none to be compelling. The existence of many possibilities brought not only confusion but also a sense that the arrow of history was lost. Any choice of how to proceed seemed arbitrary. On the other hand, the most prestigious styles employed compositional methods that were opaque to perception; that is, these methods had only an indirect relation to how listeners construed the resulting music. This was true not only of Babbitt but also, in differing degrees, of Boulez, Stockhausen, and Carter. An anecdote will clarify the point. I attended a rehearsal in which Babbitt coached one of his pieces. A prominent E? octave sounded, and the performers asked him if one of the instruments should play E?. He could not supply the answer until he consulted his row chart. Even he, with his acute musical hearing and elitist claims to musical expertise, did not know by ear which note was required. Can you imagine Mozart or Brahms in that predicament?

The phenomena of incompatible styles and opaque compositional methods were related. When a compositional method is inaccessible to perception, it does not easily spread in common usage but tends to be private and idiosyncratic. Moreover, given the high value assigned to novelty within the prevailing modernist aesthetic, the invention of a new private method could be considered more important than the artistic result.

I found this situation insupportable and sought a different way forward. I had no idea how to proceed until, in 1970, I read Noam Chomsky's Language and Mind (Chomsky 1968), which advanced the hypothesis that beneath the variety of languages lies an abstract core that all languages share and, further, that the language capacity could be studied scientifically by developing rule systems and comparing the output of rules against linguistic data. If this approach was possible for language, why could it not be for music? I imagined a way to transcend the splintering of musical styles that surrounded me and to clear my mind of the dubious notion that composer Y was significant by taking the next step from composer X, and so on in a line of supposed historical progress. Instead of looking to predecessors whom I regarded as problematic as a guide for how to compose, I would seek to understand the musical mind itself and base my composing on that. This understanding would help develop a perceptually transparent compositional method. I moved to the Boston area, the center of generative linguistics, where I hoped to find a linguist with whom to collaborate in building a comprehensive theoretical edifice.

I can now place these ambitions in a wider context. Other composers around 1970 were also rejecting hidden compositional methods and searching for organizational means that were accessible to perception. One thinks of the minimalists and Steve Reich's statement that his interest was "in a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing" (Reich 2004, 35). A few years later, a similar impulse led the spectralists Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail to try to build musical form directly from the acoustic features of sound.

More broadly, many in my generation found it difficult to believe any longer in a clear historical narrative. Leonard Meyer, in his prescient book Music, the Arts, and Ideas, argued that art was entering a phase of mutually incompatible styles that would remain in stasis (Meyer 1967, 89–232). This development was a consequence of the availability of art from all times and cultures and of the resulting dispersion of cultural authority. The habitual experimentation characteristic of modernist composition contributed to this dispersion, for individual artists pursued novelty in individual ways, leading to conflicting claims for the future and hence to a sense that everything had become relative and contingent. Furthermore, the old avant-garde had found its direction and energy by taking previously forbidden stylistic steps, but after Cage there were no more rules to break. Anything was possible. The loss of historical narrative caused a variety of postmodern reactions. Some responded with irony and pastiche; others sought comfort in the past, often through quotation; others persisted in pursuit of a private utopia; still others transferred the appetite for artistic experimentation to technological innovation. Among composers, as far as I know, only Leonard Bernstein and I turned seriously to generative linguistics for enlightenment.

I am referring, of course, to Bernstein's well-known Norton Lectures at Harvard, published later as The Unanswered Question (Bernstein 1976). Bernstein's and my goals were different. He appealed to hypotheses about the innateness of the language capacity to justify the tonality that he had employed in his greatest successes as a composer, and he supported his argument with literal analogies between language and music. I had a more open agenda: to adopt some of linguistic methodology, rather than specific analogies, in order to begin to formulate a substantive theory of the musical mind. I wanted to make new things with what I hoped to find. Contrasting attitudes aside, Bernstein's appearance at Harvard was fortunate, for his talks gave rise to heated debates in the community, and through these I met the collaborator I was seeking, the linguist Ray Jackendoff. It was to Bernstein that we made our first presentation in a small gathering at Harvard's Eliot House.

I had already encountered Bernstein in 1972 at Tanglewood, not long before his lectures. I was there for the premiere of my first major orchestral piece. Still in the throes of a creative crisis, I took the extreme step of basing the piece entirely on the notes of the B[??] major triad, as a placeholder so as to shift the locus of interest from pitch, the organization of which I was struggling with in vain, onto an intricate display of rhythm and color. On arriving at Tanglewood, I went to the weekly composition seminar and found myself face to face with Bernstein and Carter, neither of whom I had yet met. They were visibly uncomfortable with each other, as anyone familiar with the musical politics of the time can imagine, and seized on the distraction of my strange score, poring over it in spirited conversation. This exercise relieved their tension if not mine.

That year the composer and conductor Bruno Maderna substituted for Gunther Schuller as director of Tanglewood's contemporary music festival. A modernist centrist, he had no sympathy for my experiment and cancelled the performance after a few rehearsals, causing a small fracas in the press. The next winter, Schuller met with me to say that since I wrote the piece, he was determined to perform it. I have always been grateful to him for that. By that point, however, I was no longer satisfied with just a major triad and replied that I wanted to rewrite the piece with all 12 notes. I renamed it Chords. Schuller premiered it at Tanglewood on August 8, 1974, an unforgettable date because on that evening Richard Nixon resigned his presidency following the Watergate scandal. Almost everyone stayed home to watch the resignation on television. Those few who attended the concert heard Nixon's speech over loudspeakers, followed directly by a rather dazed premiere of Chords.

This series of mishaps proved to be the turning point in my quest as composer and musical thinker. The sudden appearance of a major triad in my music revealed to me that I wanted my music to have tonal centers. A B[??] major triad by itself, however, is a center only in a primitive sense. What was needed was both a center and degrees of distance from it, so that the music could depart and return, tense and relax; further, it must be possible to establish subsidiary centers. The experience also told me that I wanted harmonies with degrees of psychoacoustic rootedness, from the clear root of a major triad to an ambiguous or effectively nonexistent root. Moreover, I wanted to escape the grayness of constant circulation of the chromatic aggregate by having at my disposal a full palette of harmonies, from a simple triad to a 12-note sonority. Finally, I wanted to endow rhythm and timbre with structural rather than merely impressionistic value. All of these ideas later found a place in my theories.

Figure 1.2 gives the opening of Chords, a gradual transition from a B[??] major triad to a dissonant hexachord, developed with subtly syncopated rhythms against shifting color-chords of three flutes, then three violas, three clarinets, three cellos, and so on. This mosaiclike conception is anti-orchestral in its demands, for each instrumental group must find its exact rhythmic place as a phrase unfolds, more or less as in Central African ensemble music (Arom 1991). The succession of harmonies and timbres, however, proceeds without clear organization (although there are hints of the chromatic neighbor notes and equal divisions of the octave that emerged in subsequent works).

Figure 1.3 shows the climax of Chords, a tutti arrival on an incomplete B[??] major triad — as the composer Seymour Shifrin remarked to me, like a big ship coming to dock after a perilous voyage. The B[??] harmony piles up into a 12-note chord, recapitulating in foreshortened form the progression in figure 1.2 from triad to chromatic dissonance.

The opening of Grisey's Partiels, composed a year later, shares with Chords the reintroduction into contemporary music of psychoacoustic consonance and harmonic rootedness. The alleged imperatives of history, however, later drove the spectral movement into higher overtones and inharmonic spectra in order to avoid association with past tonal practice (exceptions are the music of Claude Vivier and Georg Friedrich Haas). This is the contradiction at the heart of spectralism: to base harmony on the harmonic series and then cover it up. The view of musical progress as an unwavering march from consonance to dissonance has always struck me as simplistic. From Chords onward, my music engaged with a full range of consonance and dissonance and degrees of tonal centricity and noncentricity. An inclusive view of harmony and centricity offered a world of structural and expressive possibilities that I had no wish to renounce.

Such a view does not shun past practice. Contemporary European composers tend to feel the weight of the past and flee from it. In a high modernist aesthetic, any association with earlier or popular practice is frowned on. Early modernists did not feel that way. Debussy evoked all kinds of music, Stravinsky and Bartók thrived on transmutation of folk materials, and Schoenberg synthesized old and new in his mature style. American composers, in contrast to their European contemporaries, are relatively free of the burden of history. I have gladly embraced the past as well as the future. To put it another way, these categories of time have not controlled my musical thought. Nor has the imitation of past styles, as in the neo-Romanticism that emerged around the time of Chords in the music of George Rochberg and David Del Tredici, interested me. I saw no reason to repeat less well what others had done before. My embrace of the past — and the future — could only be on my terms, in my own musical idiom.

I have always had an affinity for music theory. In my first year of college in 1962, while studying sixteenth-century counterpoint, I read Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, with its Adorno-drenched brew of hidden artistic order and social diagnosis. Like Adrian Leverkühn, the antihero of the novel, I tried my hand at 12-tone composition, but I was repelled by the kind of constraints that the method imposed. The serial method is a permutational system (Babbitt 2003, 56). A given row prescribes a specific interval-class order, and the canonical 12-tone operations preserve that order while permuting the pitch classes of the aggregate. Take, for example, the opening six notes of the melody of Schoenberg's Fourth Quartet in figure 1.4a. These can be transposed, inverted, or reversed. But it is contrary to the spirit of the system (albeit not impossible within it) to embellish the melody freely, as in figure 1.4b, or simplify it, as in figure 1.4c, for these steps violate the order of interval classes. While doing Palestrina-style counterpoint exercises, I enjoyed finding ways of embellishing contrapuntal lines within a structural framework. Most music from around the world, be it Indian raga, Japanese koto, or American jazz, thrives on embellishment. The syntax of human languages is structured similarly: one can elaborate a subject and verb at will with adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases, and subordinate clauses. When studying counterpoint, I had not yet even heard of Heinrich Schenker, but I instinctively sought an elaborational syntax, a hierarchy of structure and ornament. The distinction between permutational and elaborational systems was my first important theoretical insight. The concept of hierarchical elaboration eventually became fundamental to my work in composition and theory.

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Excerpted from "Composition and Cognition"
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Copyright © 2020 Fred Lerdahl.
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