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Perhaps a more subtle connection between contemporary
music and the academic life is the obvious influence of scientific attitudes
on composers. In some circles the attachment to science has become a sort
of status symbol, and strenuous efforts are made to demonstrate its existence;
but the evidence produced is frequently dubious and sometimes even faked.
We are reminded of Oswald Spengler’s prediction forty years ago that the
true representative of our age will be the engineer and that the artist
will become obsolete. Perhaps some artists fear that he was right and attempt
to demonstrate that they really are engineers, in order to be assured of
a raison d’etre.
At any rate, the very nature of the twelve-tone technique and its further development into serialism inevitably leads to a mathematical style of reasoning, and the operation of electronic sound apparatus induces scientific and technical interest. Whatever the inspiration derived from such studies, it is different from the romantic adulation of the grandeur of machinery that the futurists inaugurated. The fact that we are able to fill the heavens with containers of complicated gadgetry is impressive, but far less fascinating than the mysterious theory that made it possible. The composer dreams that the image of the universe as outlined in the concepts of Einstein’s relativity, Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy, Planck’s quantum theory or Schroedinger’s wave equations is somehow reflected and sublimated in his complex serial manipulations of musical atoms, although they do not require much beyond junior-college mathematics. If the composer’s inclination to depend on precise computation and strict over-all control is the tribute for protection exacted by Science, his attitude may be interpreted as a desperate surrender of his prerogative as a sovereign creator relying on the powers of imagination, a reduction of its infinite possibilities to the trivia of verifiable fact. But just as modern science seems to approach areas where the hard and fast relationships of old are transfigured into referential patterns having unforeseen properties, music organized under the influence of such thought processes moves on to new imaginative potentialities which might not have been visualized without experience of the scientific influence.
Ernst Krenek
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