By Any Other Name?

By Any Other Name?

By Colin Holter
Imagine, for a moment, that Structures 1a—a piece trotted out every year when undergrads have to be given a reductive and half-hearted introduction to integral serialism—went instead by the name An der Grenze des Fruchtlandes (or At the Edge of the Fertile Lands).

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Colin Holter

I’m almost finished reading M. J. Grant’s excellent Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics, a consideration of European postwar serial thought offering a musicological (as opposed to theoretical) perspective so often missing from conversations about that creative situation. Drawing heavily on issues of die Reihe and other primary sources from the 1940s and 1950s, Grant establishes the cultural stakes of serialism in Europe after the war and, crucially, connects musical practices to contemporary developments in technology, literature, and the plastic arts. She also recounts a number of juicy factoidal tidbits easily swept under the carpet, including the following bombshell: The original title of Boulez’s Structures 1a was An der Grenze des Fruchtlandes, or At the Edge of the Fertile Lands.

Imagine, for a moment, that Structures 1a—a piece trotted out every year when undergrads have to be given a reductive and half-hearted introduction to integral serialism—went instead by the name An der Grenze des Fruchtlandes. All of a sudden, the new laziest way to grasp the piece is to hear it as a piece of descriptive music rather than as a math problem: The crossing of a threshold from one landscape to another, a quilt of neatly plowed fields behind and a vista of untamed and possibly untamable wilderness in front. Imagine how much easier it would be for people who don’t particularly care to know about contemporary music to like that piece, even if they still declined the task of understanding it (a task Grant takes up in her book).

Not so fast, though: Just where are those stunning landscapes? On French soil, still marked with Panzer treads? In Germany, the ex-Vaterland recently bombed into oblivion? One of the most striking things about die Reihe is the extreme reluctance of its contributors to write explicitly about politics: The fear of propagandization is near-palpable. Grant goes into some detail about the suitability of the title Structures for Boulez’s set of works, but she hardly needs to explain why An der Grenze des Fruchtlandes would have been impossible.

At any rate, I can recommend Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics with little reservation: If questions like these are sometimes on your mind, Grant has the data and insight to provide some answers.