Serialism’s Last Hurrah?

For most American fans of concert music,serialism is dead, and not particularly missed. The dense tone rows of composers who embraced Arnold Schoenberg’s vision of the future of music never caught on with a public devoted to melody, and in recent years, minimalism and neo-Romanticism have become far more common in the concert hall. But ever since James Levine took over the Boston Symphony, serialism has been having something of a mini-Renaissance in the Northeast.