Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe (Music in the Twentieth Century, Series Number 16)

Composers of serial music in post-war Europe wrote almost as much about music as the music itself, but the relationship between theory and practice in the work of key figures like Stockhausen, Eimert, Pousseur and Schnebel has often been misrepresented. Focusing on the controversial journal Die Reihe, this book traces serialism's cultural history, its debt to the artistic theories of Klee and Mondrian, and its relationship to contemporary developments in concrete art, poetry and information aesthetics. It sketches a aesthetic theory of serialism as an experimental music.