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. . . I
generally use the word set; let me explain
why. When Schoenberg came to this country, he knew very little English,
as I’ve already said. There were two words for “row”
or “series” or “set”
in German. One of them was Reihe, for which there is no obvious
translation. The other was Folge, which very few people realized
was constantly being used in the literature of that time. Native speakers
of German would call it a “succession.” When
Schoenberg came to this country,
he realized that everybody had taken Reihe and translated it literally
as “row.” . . . The word Reihe
bothered him
because it became row.
And to him row suggested left to right—something in a
row—and
that’s what it does connote. And that connotation, he thought, was part
of all these misunderstandings about the twelve-tone notion having to do
with some sort of thematic, motivic thing that went from left to right.
It upset him, so he asked various friends about it.
Now the word that I preferred and still prefer is the word series. The word series is a very decent one, because all it involves is a very special relation that has been defined from centuries as a term of abstract relation theory: seriation. It applies to a succession of notes ordered in any way that you can perceive them in music: for example, in time and space and by dynamics. It’s simply a series relationship. It’s irreflexive, it’s asymmetric, and it’s transitive; and that’s exactly what it is, so, therefore, the reasonable thing is to use the word that everybody’s been using in civilized society for about a hundred years and call it series. But Schoenberg had German friends, and German friends always know English better than we natives. So they said, “Oh no, you can’t use the word series, because series always implies a plus or a minus as in ‘an arithmetical series’ or ‘a geometrical series’ or ‘a trigonometric series.’ ” This is nonsense, of course. But they were mathematicians, so he said, “No, I can’t use series.” And I regret to tell you, I am guilty. I suggested the word set, which had absolutely no meaning in music as yet. It came out of mathematics (not that that pleased me particularly) and it seemed to be a neutral term. Of course, a set does not mean anything ordered, but if you append twelve-tone or twelve-pitch-class to the word set, then that implies an ordered set and that’s a very familiar structure, too, in abstract relation theory. So there we were. . . .
Milton Babbitt
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