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The most popular objection to twelve-tone technique
is that it makes music dependent on mathematics and destroys the highly
valued action of inspiration. I shall soon go further into the alleged
relation of music to mathematics; here I shall merely point out the cardinal
difference between them. The objection can be interpreted as follows: Everything
in the twelve-tone technique is prearranged, as in science; imagination
no longer has full sway; and composition henceforth will consist of filling
in diagrams formed by abstract calculations. But the essence of the mathematical
process is that a unique solution must be traced for each problem. The
elementary equation (which is all that the layman has in mind) consists
of finding a single value for the unknown factor which alone fulfills the
conditions. But the theorem is in no sense applicable to the twelve-tone
technique. The musician can not only devise a thousand completely different
compositions in using the same twelve-tone series; he can, in addition,
proceed from any point of a given opus in an entirely new direction, and
that without breaking the rules. The question of how to proceed is not
predetermined, but depends exclusively on the composer’s artistic
intention,
controlled here, as in any other method of composing, by his imagination,
and by nothing else.
Inspiration is no more limited by the twelve-tone technique than by any other system of musical rules. That music is subject to rules is a fact not even doubted by those reactionaries who become excited over the “dictatorship” of the method, after decades spent in reproaching new music for being “anarchistic” simply because it destroyed the old rules.
Ernst Krenek
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