António Lopes

LANCOG, University of Lisbon

Sense and Sensibility: Musical Meaning, Expression and Sincerity in Atonal Serialism

8 March 2019, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Steven Cavell famously asked “Must We Mean What We Say?” (1969). Applied to twelve-tone, serial music, the question would be: must serial composers mean what they write? This is due to features and limitations of the serial style or idiom. But are not composers responsible for choosing a style, at least since the 20th century, and thus, to be criticized if the idiom they chose cannot express most of the central musical meanings usually expressible in almost all other musical idioms, from folk music to contemporary non-serial classical music? I will rely mainly on the critique of serialism by Diana Raffman, and on the facts about the limits of musical cognition and memory to which results in recent psychology of music point to, but also on arguments by Roger Scruton, before presenting mine. If the critiques are convincing and those limitations are indeed a fact about human psychology, then, given the prestige and dominance of serialism as the only new “serious” compositional style during the three last quarters of the previous century, in spite of its rejection by the vast majority of a sophisticated public such as the average one for classical music, we may ask: might not artistic sincerity or integrity be at stake in the acceptance of an ineffective idiom such as serialism as the only possible next step in the evolution of music by composers, academics, concert managers, critics, minus the public (and possibly most performers)? I’ll claim that it may, in at least two senses, one of which is relevant to the topic of artistic value and authorial creative merit at the “high art” level at issue here.