390 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
that together formed an independent force. Grounded in a
changing view of music history, some branches of the acad-
emy welcomed pre-Bach and modern repertories, which the
concert hall had tended to exclude. And in a nation where
homegrown classical composers had never played more than
a small role in the concert hall, the academy included them in
its framework.
Thus the music of new composers, supported by the acad-
emy and by commissions, prizes, and fellowships, gained lis-
teners more readily outside than inside the concert hall. The
academic environment shared certain features with scientifi c
laboratories. In 1958 Milton Babbitt, a composer on the faculty
at Princeton University, likened himself and other “specialist”
composers—working outside the confi nes of general audience
esteem, critics’ approval, or the skills of most performers—to mathematicians and
physicists. Freed from the need to engage with any but a specialist audience, they
could explore music in the manner of scientifi c researchers. At that point, the gap
between concert hall and composer widened into a true rift.
The concert hall—the one institution where the priorities of composer,
performers, critics, impresarios, and audiences all had to be considered and
reconciled—remained the public embodiment of the classical sphere. But the
academy’s emergence after World War II challenged that position. University
teacher-composers could create specialized new music while ignoring impresarios
and the general audience—both essential to the concert hall, which relied on the
public for support. To a large extent, composition in postwar America refl ects the
splitting of the classical sphere into two complementary aspects—concert hall and
academy—each with its own distinct preferences and goals.POSTWAR COMPOSITION
The postwar academic environment encouraged compositional approaches
that could be rationally explained. Foremost among these was the serial method
invented by Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna in the early 1920s. The fi rst and
most basic form of serialism is twelve-tone music, in which the composer
arranges all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale into a particular sequence,
or series, also called a tone row. Twelve-tone technique substitutes for tonal-
ity, which Schoenberg abandoned around 1910, believing that music had long
been evolving toward total chromaticism and atonality. Twelve-tone music
offers a way to order pitches systematically without the gravitational pull of key
centers.
Composers in America approached the twelve-tone technique in a variety
of ways. Roger Sessions, who taught composition at the University of Cali-
fornia and Princeton, believed with Schoenberg that certain historical laws
were inherent in the nature of music; in the postwar years he embraced the
twelve-tone method, as did Aaron Copland. The most dramatic proof of seri-
alism’s postwar reach, however, came from Igor Stravinsky, long considered
the polar opposite of Schoenberg. In the early 1950s Stravinsky discovered
the music of Schoenberg’s pupil Anton Webern and began writing twelve-
tone music himself, as in his ballet Agon, which mixes serial and non-serial
approaches.K Five of America’s
leading classical composers
of the postwar era were
photographed studiously
avoiding each other’s gaze:
(from left, standing) Samuel
Barber, Aaron Copland,
(from left, seated) Virgil
Thomson, Gian Carlo
Menotti, and William
Schuman.172028_16_386-411_r3_sd.indd 390 23/01/13 10:56 AM