ABSTRACT
The straightforwardness of most experimental music, which usually finds the most direct route to the effective presentation of the chosen sound material, might be interpreted by an outsider as a reaction to traditional and modernist intellectual complexity. In Reich and Young, specific, if unconventional, musical attitudes revealed themselves to be at work within serialism, rather than as a blanket reaction against serialism. Reich has spoken of the intervallic consistency' of the Orchestral Variations, which gives a kind of harmonic sound to his music'. Perhaps the reaction of experimental composers to the so-called intellectual complexity of avant-garde music is a reaction not against intellectual complexity itself, but against what brings about the need for such complexity, as well as its audible result. And just as pre-thirteenth-century and non-Western music often present surprisingly complex perceptual problems for the listener reared on European classical music, so too does this simple' music that the author has chosen to call experimental.
