Serial Music: Continued Discussion with Mark Gould: A Composer’s Journal Entry: April 10, 2007

Photo: two pages of the new score of the Image, "Dance".


Tuesday, April 10th

Received another interesting e-mail from Mark Gould today:

Hello Laurie! I will be thinking about my answers this evening, but it may be later this week when I can email them to you. I should like very much to 'explain' some of the things that I believe are important to twelve- note music, but that influence technique, and perhaps also the composer's inner reason for choosing this method as a foundation on which to build their creative work.

However, I had to comment on a point you have made about your own response to the twelve-note idea:

For example, though I don't reuse rows (unless they are related compositions), I did analyse a good number of the rows I had used (and sketched works with) in about 1995, and did discover that many of them shared harmonic profiles, or that they could be transformed into each other in simple permutational ways, but that also one row kept recurring during this process:

C-sharp D G B C F A-flat B-flat E-flat F-sharp E A

to borrow a German term, this was my 'urreihe', or 'basic row'. Our conversation has made me look back over my own writings on twelve- note music (an introductory book, a technical article attempting to show how transformations could form tonal analogues of keys, on combinatoriality and other issues) and I found a little snippet:

'A composer's style is often characterised by harmonic and thematic fingerprints, chords or motivic segments that the ear instantly recognises and attaches that composer's name to. In an earlier time we may have related these to their use of tonality. It may well be that a serial composer's 'fingerprint' is related to a fundamental series, a basic shape that embodies their response to both the method itself but also their own character and expressive desires.'

(I use series and serial quite a bit in my writing, having read a great many books which use this term over 'row', but I am deliberately using 'row' in our conversations to keep our terminology clear.)

I hope that I am not distracting you from your work... I am enjoying your comments (reading them in a sunny garden here in the UK), and they have reaffirmed my own 'faith' in twelve-note music as a living technique.

Mark

L.C.: Hello dear Mark! As usual, I enjoyed your response and found it knowledgeable, informative and also very interesting. As for this quote from your own writings:

"It may well be that a serial composer's 'fingerprint' is related to a fundamental series, a basic shape that embodies their response to both the method itself but also their own character and expressive desires."

I fully agree, and well said. If twelve tone music could not reflect the mind and heart and soul of the composer, then it could not be considered a true art form. If we think of a composer's music as an emanation from their deepest being - which I would call the Soul - then certain patterns would naturally emerge and unfold, as a reflection of the essence of the inner being.

Best wishes and thank you again for this discussion.

Laurie