Arbitrary Music Now the Fashion; Inspiration's Out

"If after laborious computation the composer produces only musical chaos, why not simply start with chaos?" Ernst Krenek, composer and visiting professor of Music at Brandeis University, asked last night in Kirkland House.

Discussing the postwar denial of the romantic concept of "inspiration," Krenek said "the composer doesn't believe in inspiration any longer." The romantic's inspiration was predetermined, Krenek said, by his technical equipment-by his grasp of four-part harmony and counter-point.

According to Krenek serial music is an attempt to reinject a personal element into composition. The composer of serial music predetermines the organization of sound material arbitrarily, while the non-serial composer is restricted by the demands of the conventional harmonic structure, he explained.

Krenek pointed to twelve-tone music as a specialized case of serial music. The twelve-tone composer exerts his prerogative when he determines the organization of pitch prior to actual composition. Serial music extends arbitrary pre-organization to other musical elements, such as dynamics, rhythm, range and density, Krenek said.

As an example of series music Krenek played a tape of his "Quaestio Temporis," a short piece for chamber orchestra. "It sounds completely random," he said, following the tape, "but it is actually highly structured." The listener has difficulty in orienting himself because there is no tempo in the conventional sense, he explained; rather, there are six different speed zones which are determined by a Fibonacci series, in which each element is the sum of the two proceeding.

Krenek cited several other attempts to break away from conventional romantic inspiration. In a San Francisco concert this year, musicians sat around a goldfish bowl on which they had painted a staff; they put a large goldfish in the bowl, and played the music it swam out.

"You laugh now," he said when he finished the anecdote, "but you would not have laughed at the concert."