ABSTRACT
One has to go a long, long way back to find anything comparable in the history of Western music. At one time, the musical profession seemed to be, like so many others, a matter of family inheritance and tradition. The mind is exhilarated when feeling itself in gear, as it were, with the very impetus that gives rise to musical form and when it discovers that pure abstract motion can be understood as a language, with a world of images which are specifically its own. Even the first compositions in which only pure – or sinusoidal – tones were used, progressed at a rate of weeks or months of intricate operations for each second of composed music. Twelve-note composition – to whose methods “serialists” and pointillistes are most particularly indebted – is, perhaps not unnaturally, especially selected for kicks under the table; but it lies in the nature of the operation that they cannot always be well-aimed.
