Structuralists contra Serialists? Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Boulez on Avant-Garde Music
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The adepts of serial music since the end of the 1950s seemed destined to ally themselves with structuralist thought—the broadly defined intellectual movement that profoundly marked the social sciences and humanities. The importance of the metaphor of language to the serialist project of Pierre Boulez in particular seemed sufficient to pave the way towards a conceptual alliance between avant-garde music and structuralist thought. Nevertheless, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s acerbic pronouncements on serial music as well as musique concrète that appeared in the famous “Overture” to The Raw and the Cooked (1964) made it clear that Lévi-Strauss was no friend of the serialist project. Drawing on recent research by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Nicolas Donin, and Frédéric Keck, this article will argue that the serialist compositional project of the postwar era, embodied primarily in the figure of Pierre Boulez, can be considered “structuralist” in the sense of the intellectual movement promulgated by Claude Lévi-Strauss, despite the latter’s denunciation of serial music.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".