Post-Twelve-Note Analysis

Extract

Composers are often regarded as ahead of their time. There is nothing new about this situation, indeed, the average listener's capacity for understanding is likely to be exceeded by precisely those composers who have most to offer in terms of the avoidance of cliché and the exploration of new possibilities, even if they by no means reject all aspects of tradition. One of the contributory factors to this seemingly inevitable time-lag is the fact that analysis, in its broadest sense as the establishment of an accepted and precise terminology to apply to musical compositions, rarely keeps pace with compositional practice. It is frequently bedevilled by the superstition that there must be something wrong with verbalizing about music, and in this situation a term may find favour because of its very vagueness. Still worse, the emergence and discussion of one such term can facilitate the uncritical acceptance of others. For example, the fuss over ‘aleatory’ in recent years has tended to prevent discussion of an even more misleading term, ‘athematic’. ‘Aleatory’ at least has the virtue of novelty, but ‘athematic’, like ‘atonal’, takes a concept already sufficiently vague, then deepens its obscurity by the simple addition of the negative prefix.