called a Hit Machinenow had their counterparts almost
throughout serious music.
The conservatives these days, for instance, were the twelve-
tone composersalways, in Strauss’s opinions, a dryly me-
chanical lot, but never more so than now. Their gods
Berg, Schoenberg, von Webernwere looked upon by the
concert-going public as great masters, on the abstruse side
perhaps, but as worthy of reverence as any of the Three B’s.
There was one wing of the conservatives, however, which
had gone the twelve-tone procedure one better. These men
composed what was called “stochastic music,” put together
by choosing each individual note by consultation with tables
of random numbers. Their bible, their basic text, was a vol-
ume called Operational Aesthetics, which in turn derived from
a discipline called information theory; and not one word of
it seemed to touch upon any of the techniques and customs
of composition which Strauss knew. The ideal of this group
was to produce music which would be “universal”that is,
wholly devoid of any trace of the composer’s individuality,
wholly a musical expression of the universal Laws of Chance.
The Laws of Chance seemed to have a style of their own, all
right; but to Strauss it seemed the style of an idiot child
being taught to hammer a flat piano, to keep him from
getting into trouble.
By far the largest body of work being produced, however,
fell into a category misleadingly called “science-music.” The
term reflected nothing but the titles of the works, which dealt
with space flight, time travel, and other subjects of a romantic