The 1950s and 1960s saw a profusion of avant-garde works that employ some degree of mobility, the best-known being Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI and Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 3. This chapter surveys discourse on indeterminacy, open works and mobility in order to test the hypothesis that the existence of recordings created a new ontology that allowed in part for mobile works to come on the scene. Since the work’s “essence” would henceforth be assured by recordings, scores were freed from their role as guarantors of a work’s ontology, allowing them to become more playful and open-ended. This chapter focuses on the way contemporary listeners may have understood this connection. In this light, mobile works can be viewed as a “phonograph effect” (in Mark Katz’s sense), and some of the basic historiographic presuppositions about musical modernism, one that sees an autonomous avant-garde isolated from a burgeoning record industry, are thereby interrogated.

Between 1958 and 1960, three prominent figures of the European post-war musical avant-garde premiered major works for spatially distributed orchestral groups: Pierre Boulez’s Doubles, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen and Carré, and Henri Pousseur’s Rimes pour multiples sources sonores. This period coincides with the introduction of stereo long-playing records that led to the mass distribution of stereo sound technology, buoyed by an aggressive marketing campaign. To what extent were listeners’ experiences of spatialized works like Doubles, Gruppen and Rimes informed by their new familiarity with stereo sound? How did composers respond to listeners’ expectations about, and understanding of, stereo in their spatialized works? This chapter evaluates the extent to which an allusion to the technology of stereophony was inscribed into these works, an inscription that might include both ways audiences were inclined to hear stereophonic effects in these works and composers might have reacted in their works to these expectations.

The chapter starts with an account of the rather hesitant and belated reception of twelve-tone technique in Western Europe, as exemplified by the situation in Italy, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. This is followed by an overview of the origins of European multiple serialism extending beyond Webern and Messiaen. The chapter shows above all that European serialism should not be restricted to its main protagonists such as Boulez, Nono, or Stockhausen. The music historical narrative of this important development in the period 1950–75 is in want of a more diverse view. Consequently, this chapter focuses on lesser-known composers of serial music such as Jean Barraqué, Michel Fano, Gilbert Amy, Karel Goeyvaerts, Herman Van San, Henri Pousseur, Bruno Maderna, Gottfried Michael Koenig, Bill Hopkins, and Bo Nilsson. The perspective is not merely broadened by introducing other composers who wrote aesthetically appealing works, but more importantly, presented other interpretations of what constitutes multiple serialism.

While the ‘post-serial’ has been a resilient critical category over more than half a century, its status remains problematised by ongoing debates around the nature and limits of the serial itself. In particular, as insight grows into European serial practice after World War II, so does the case for understanding serialism as a more capacious concept than hitherto, embracing not only technique but also aesthetic and – a category regarded as taboo by certain of its practitioners – style. The generalisations that serialism underwent in the 1950s led less to a rigidly deterministic model of ‘total’ serialism than to a proliferation of the concept in many directions. Its seemingly endless possibilities of permutation led it (surprisingly to some) towards the statistical and the aleatory, while its notion of the ‘parameter’ went at times beyond the conventional categories of pitch and rhythm to embrace the manipulation of text, action and gesture. If relatively few composers now profess an overt allegiance to serialism, fewer still can entirely avoid the explicit reflections on material and process that it stimulated.