J. Anthony Allen traces serialism's emergence from post-WWI trauma and Expressionism's emotional intensity. He explains how prime forms organize serial composition, using Luigi Nono's Il Canto Sospeso as an example of the technique in practice.
This piece was written in 1934, I think. So what's going on in the world in 1934? World War I is over. World War I ended about 1918. So World War I is over. However, a lot of these composers that were writing this kind of music were in World War I. And oddly enough, a lot of them were truck drivers. I don't know why that is, but I feel like I remember reading, like, a biography of a composer, then saying, like, they drove a truck in the war in World War I. And then another composer biography, and it said, they drove a truck in World War I. I feel like I read that a whole bunch of times. But a lot of these people saw horrible things in this war, right? Horrible things. In fact, if you look over into visual art, what's happening in visual art right now, you get a movement called Expressionism. And Expressionism was a movement where the painters were painting not the subject, but, like, the raw emotion of the subject is what they were really trying to capture. Which you can see demonstrates that thing. I was just talking about pictures like this. Okay? So here's what we have here. If we read it from right to left, we have all of our prime forms, okay? From D to B, E flat to C, G to E. Those are all of our prime forms, right? An example of this is Luigi Nono is the composer Il Canto Sospesso. This is a dramatic and fascinating piece. It's quite long. This video I pulled up here is just the first sa.
