Chapter 2

Please keep these annotations SPOILER-FREE by not revealing information from later pages in the novel.

Arnold Schoenberg devised serialism, a new approach to organizing musical notes that doesn't rely on the diatonic scale (with its whole and half steps giving certain notes prominance over other notes and creating tonal polarization). According to strict serialism, all twelve notes of the chromatic scale are used, arranged in rows, and each note in the row must played in order. Thus, all the notes have equal weight, and by analogy serialism can be seen as entropic in that it moves from the asymmetry of tonal polarization towards symmetry and equality of notes. As Gustav Schlabone says in Gravity's Rainbow about another German who pushed the envelope, "[Beethoven] represents the German dialectic, the incorporation of more and more notes into the scale, culminating with dodecaphonic democracy, where all the notes get an equal hearing." (440) If one played all the Schoenberg quartets (as the WSC does at their party), beginning with the D major string quartet (1897) and ending with String Quartet No. 4 (1936), a progression from lower to higher entropy would be traced.