This paragraph caught my eye:

Some music theorists have criticized serialism on the basis that the compositional strategies employed are often incompatible with the way information is extracted by the human mind from a piece of music. Nicolas Ruwet (1959) was one of the first to criticise serialism through a comparison with linguistic structures. Henri Pousseur (1959) questioned the equivalence made by Ruwet between phoneme and the single note, and suggested that analyses of serial compositions that Ruwet names as exceptions to his criticisms might “register the realities of perception more accurately.” Later writers have continued Ruwet’s line of reasoning. Fred Lerdahl, for example, outlines this subject further in his essay “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems” (Lerdahl 1988). Lehrdahl has in turn been criticized for excluding “the possibility of other, non-hierarchical methods of achieving musical coherence,” and for concentrating on the audibility of tone rows (Grant 2001, 219), and the portion of his essay focussing on Boulez’s “multiplication” technique (exemplified in three movements of Le Marteau sans maître) has been challenged on perceptual grounds by Stephen Heinemann (1998).

Although the above paragraph refers to “the way information is extracted by the human mind,” I think the problem is not that the serialist information is encoded in a way that is difficult for the human mind to extract (it may well be), so much as there is possibly insufficient information encoded to begin with, by any reasonable measure. Certainly, the compositional strategies of serialism call for much randomization and uniform dithering, such that most of what appears to be informative content is in fact common randomness coupled with very very little actual musical idea. I mean that’s how this music gets written right? A tiny bit of innovation, then mechanically amplified by pseudorandomness.

I don’t know enough about this, so just pure speculation here. Note to self, read: Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems

Contemporary Music Review
Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group
Issue: Volume 6, Number 2 / 1992
Pages: 97 – 121
URL: Linking Options
DOI: 10.1080/07494469200640161

Cognitive constraints on compositional systems

Fred Lerdahl
Columbia University, New York City

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