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 or an unlikely nature. There was nothing in the least sci-entific about the music, which consisted of a m61ange of cliches and imitations of natural sounds, in which Strauss was horrified to see his own time-distorted and diluted image.