Pierre Boulez’s total serialism depended, in the words of Jeremy Begbie, “on the rigorous organization of music through the use of strict mathematical patterns.” The results were, Begbie says, “extremely dull, indeed, some of the most tedious ever written.”

Around the same time, John Cage was composing “chance music,” made, for example, through “random acts such as tossing coins” (Begbie). Boulez was annoyed to find that Cage’s music sounded much like his own, a demonstration of Boulez’s own observation that “a surfeit of order [is] equivalent to disorder.” The bid for absolute human control leads to chaos, a reality repeatedly demonstrated, as Begbie points out, by the past century’s political history.