The Question of Order in New Music

SERIAL MUSIC is often thought of as the fruit of excessive speculation and the result of an exclusive mustering of the powers of reason. Everything that occurs within it is constructed according to preestablished quantities and justified by the rules of a purely combinatorial logic. Except for the rules and quantities themselves, nothing would seem to have been left within the realm of free invention, to gratuitous inspiration or to a more subjective intuition. In short, a pitiless regimentation would appear to rule over this music, controlling the course of events even in their most intimate details. But if one goes beyond a simple analysis of such music and beyond a dissection of its notations, if one relies primarily on concrete hearing-a hearing which might even be concentrated enough to put all one's receptive faculties into play-it often happens that one perceives just the contrary of such regimentation. Precisely where the most abstract constructions have been applied, it is not seldom that one has the impression of finding oneself in the presence of consequences of an aleatory free play. If (to cite a particularly relevant example) we listen to the third piece in the first book of Structures for two pianos by Pierre Boulezmusic composed in 1951 according to norms which fix the place of each element in the ensemble precisely, and in all respects-we can hear a kind of massing together of sounds into statistical groups of varied densities; many of the metrical relations intended by the composer remain cut off from our hearing and are therefore practically absent with respect to our perception. If the charm of the music is undeniable nonetheless, that is less the result of a perfectly clear and transparent "geometry" than of the more mysterious charm to be found in our awareness of many distributive forms found in nature: the unhurried dispersion of passing clouds, the twinkle of pebbles in the bed of a mountain stream, or the breaking of surf against a rocky coast. A close examination of some examples may enable us to better understand the paradoxical relationship between the intention and