In contrast to his formulae, whose sterility is not eliminated by t~ his habit of pointing to them as if to a sublime and unalterabl~ norm,

the composer's relationship to those features of the tonal idiom which have freed themselves from their original context Vers une musique informelle material in a process of progressively greater appropriateness. Anyone who refuses to take cognizance ofsuch a dialectic will fall victim to the sterility of the New Sobriety [neue Sachlichkeit]. This transferred to music requirements which were already encoun- tering resistance in architecture from where they originated, even though they had a greater justification in the practical exigencies of architecture than in music. The risk I am alluding to manifests itself in what I have heretically termed the loss of tension. The real social ernascu- lation of the individual, which everyone feels, does not leave the artist unscathed. It is scarcely imaginable that in an age when the individual is so diminished and is conscious of his impotence and apathy, he should feel the same compulsion to produce as did individuals in more heroic epochs. Given the anthropology ofthe present age, the call for a nonrevisionist music is to expect too much. Composers tend to react to it by renouncing any control of their music by their ego. They prefer to drift and to refrain from intervening, in the hope that, as in Cage's bon mot, it will be not Webern speaking, but the music itself. Their aim is to transform psychological ego weakness into aesthetic strength. Something of the sort may be said to have been anticipated by their f!rttiQQ~e,integral twelvenote technique, if we view it as the attempt to free the ear from the obligation of ubiquitous immediacy, permanent presence, by normalizing and insti- tutionalizing that obligation. But the very relief this brought resulted in an important shift, a quite concrete and specific shift of emphasis in the material itself. I mention just one example. One of the crucial impulses of twelve...note technique, one recently confirmed in W ebern's posthumously published lectures, was the prohibition on repeating anyone note before all the others had appeared. A work like Webern's Bagatelles for String Quartet, Opus 9, which does not yet embody the prin- ciples of dodecaphony, obeys this injunction more purely and more rigorously than anything that came later. One argument in favour ofthe thesis that systematization brings about a qualitative change, is that the moment the four basic row shapes were fixed, music abandoned the experience which gave rise to them. If a 283 has resulted in egregious difficulties whose effects are still with us. In Kranichstein I once accused a composition, which in intention at least had managed to unify all possible parameters, of vagueness in its musical language. Where, I asked, was the antecedent, and where the consequent? This criticism has to be modified. Contemporary music cannot be forced into such apparently universal categories as 'antecedent' and 'consequent', as if they were unalterable. It is nowhere laid down that modern music must a priori contain such elements of the tradition as tension and resolution, continuation, development, contrast and reassertion; all the less since memories ofall that are the frequent cause of crude inconsistencies in the new material and the need to correct these is itself a motive force in modern music. 30 Of course musical categories are probably indispensable to 2., achieve articulation, even if they have to be wholly transformed, unless we are going to rest content with an undifferentiated jumble of sounds. The problem, however, is not to restore the traditional categories, but to develop equivalents to suit the new materials, so that it will become possible to perform in a transparent manner the tasks which were formerly carried out in an irrational and ultimately inadequate way. This would be the prime task of thematerial__theory which I am envisaging here.6 But if the materials of music are"not static, and if to work with the available materials is to

mean more than contenting oneself with a craftsmanlike approach which aims at no more than the skilful manipulation of the means available, then materials the~selves will be modified by the act of composition. The materials will emerge from every successful work they enter, as if newly born. The secret of composition is the energy which moulds the