LETTERS.(Letter to the Editor)

A Descent in Twelve Tones

To the editor,

Edward Rothstein's article on PC follies in musicology (Winter 1999-2000) is the first, I believe, to treat this topic at length. One or two words could be added to the account by way of providing historical background.

Few people know that music succumbed to the regime of political correctness long before any of her sister arts. After World War II, in the American academy, a musical idiom derived from Schoenberg's systematic chromaticism became de rigueur. The influential Roger Sessions, whose long career took him from Princeton via Harvard to Juilliard, adopted a version of pitch-serialism as early as 1947 and imposed it on students and aspiring composers as a dogma from which no dissent would be tolerated. In the words of Norman Lebrecht, Sessions "warned heatedly against divergence from these [arbitrarily imposed] norms and established a climate [in departments of music and composition] in which his pupil [Milton] Babbitt wielded a dictatorship of East Coast academicism over concert creativity." The regime of the serialists succeeded in suppressing a tradition in American composition that had actually built up a wide audience for classical music. As Sessions, Babbitt, and a score of others came to the fore, the vital music of Hanson, Harris, Creston, Piston, and Barber retreated under the rubric of reactionism. A school of musicology, inspired by the Marxist analysis of Adorno (whom Rothstein mentions), declared that music which connected with an audience, who might go away whistling the tunes, was inauthentic; only the alienating music of the atonalists authentically represented the contradictions of the capitalist crisis.

When the composer George Rochberg, hitherto orthodox in his compositional procedures, offered his Mahlerian String Quartet No. 3 in 1968, his use of late-nineteenth century, tonal devices caused a scandal, and he immediately became an object of critical scorn for having turned his back on the mandatory Schoenberg-Webern formula. With the possible exception of Alban Berg's Violin Concerto (1935), no twelve-tone, or atonal, or pitch-serialist composition has ever managed to garner an audience. Ironically, composers who could not find a hearing in the dreary era from 1950 to 1980 are now generously represented in commercial recordings on compact disc. A number of conductors (Leonard Slatkin and Gerard Schwarz come immediately to mind) have made their reputations by committing the symphonic and chamber music of the suppressed generation to disc. The un-PC music of the great film composers (Korngold, Steiner, North, Goldsmith, Hermann, to name a few) has also gained a new and sympathetic hearing.

The history of academic music-life in the United States over the last fifty years offers a parallel to that of music-life in Russia under the Soviet regime. There, it was atonalism that came under the harsh ban, while a cheery Tchaikovskyism was the tightly enforced rule. In our country, the very tradition being enforced by Zhdanov and Khrennikov came under a ban and a homogeneous atonalism became the vigorously enforced rule. The principle was the same in both cases: the elites know better than the audience what is good for them musically; the audience must accept what the elites judge conducive to its attitudinal transformation. Even so, the traditional school appears to be having the last laugh. Barber, Hanson, Creston, and a host of others have a new lease on life; obligatory atonalism is deader than the proverbial doornail.

There is certainly room for additional scholarship on this fascinating and important subject.