A method of composing music in which a series (or row or set) of different notes is used, in accordance with certain strict practices, as the basis of a whole work. The most common type is 12-note serialism, in which the 12 pitches of the chromatic scale are re-ordered to form one of a possible 479 001 600 different series. This can then be presented vertically as chords, or horizontally as melodic lines, or as a mixture of both; it can be used backwards (retrograde), or with the intervals inverted (inversion), or in both retrograde and inversion; it can also be transposed to any other pitch. Thus, 48 versions of a single series are possible, and these provide all the pitch material for the composition. Schoenberg arrived at 12-note serialism in 1923, as a means of structuring atonal music; his method was adopted, in very different ways, by his pupils Berg and Webern. Some later composers, notably Boulez, Nono, and Stockhausen, have applied serial methods to such other elements of composition as rhythm, dynamics, and articulation.
In music serialism is a technique for composition that uses sets to describe musical elements, and allows the manipulation of those sets. Serialism is often, though not universally, held to begin with twelve-tone technique, which uses a set of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale to form a row (a nonrepeating arrangement of the 12 tones of the chromatic scale) as the unifying basis for a composition's melody, harmony, structural progressions, and variations. When not used synonymously, serialism differs from twelve-tone technique in that any number of elements from any musical dimension (called "parameters") may be ordered, such as duration, register, dynamics, or timbre.
Important serial composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, and Jean Barraqué, went through extended periods of time in which they disciplined themselves always to use some variety of serialism in writing their music.
Basic definition
The use of the word serial in connection with music was first introduced in French by René Leibowitz (1947), and immediately afterward by Humphrey Searle in English, as an alternative translation of the German Zwölftontechnik Twelve-tone technique or Reihenmusik (row music); independently introduced by Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen into German in 1954 as serielle Musik, with a different meaning, translated into English also as "serial music".
Serialism is most specifically defined as the structural principle according to which a recurring series of ordered elements (normally a set – or 'row' – of pitches or 'pitch classes') which are used in order, or manipulated in particular ways, to give a piece unity. Serialism is often broadly applied to all music written in what Arnold Schoenberg called "The Method of Composing with Twelve Tones related only to one another", or dodecaphony, and methods which evolved from his methods. It is sometimes used more specifically to apply only to music where at least one other element other than pitch is subjected to being treated as a row or series. The term Schoenbergian serialism is sometimes used to make the same distinction between use of pitch series only, particularly if there is an adherence to post-Romantic textures, harmonic procedures, voice-leading and other audible elements of 19th century music. In such usages post-Webernian serialism will be used to denote works which extend serial techniques to other elements of music.
Serialism has been described by its practitioners as an extension and formalisation of earlier methods of 'cellular' thematic and motivic unification in classical and romantic music.
Most serial music is deliberately structured as such.
This row or series is used in one form as the "basic set", which constitutes the "center" of gravity for the piece. Each row or series is supposed to have three other forms: retrograde, or the basic set backwards, inverted, or the basic set "upside down" and retrograde-inverted, which is the basic set upside down and backwards.
Serial composition then involves the creation of classes of musical elements; and then using techniques of serial compostion, presenting the original set or sets in a myriad of forms to create a work of music. Very generally the act of composition per se takes the form of fixing, or otherwise constraining, in the case of indeterminate music, a sequence of units with particular parameters.
Composers have often built their pieces from discrete, atomic units – in most cases one just calls them "notes" – that enjoy a fixed identity and status within an extended musical practice and beyond the confines of any one particular composition.
The first wave of post-war serialism focused on placing more and more of the musical elements in a piece under serial control. This has led many serial composers to adopt a style that allows space for each individual unit to assert its identity, to "speak," often using a "punctual" or "pointillist" style modelled in part on the music of Webern as an example.
However, this tendency is generally thought to have peaked around 1954, and composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen and Morton Feldman began to look at serial composition as an approach rather than a specific set of techniques. no sharp line divides serial and nonserial music. Xenakis in his early compositions, for example, combines highly parametric thinking using serial techniques with statistical procedures that generate emergent textures, which are not subjected to serial treatment.
Serial procedures were combined with the use of aleatory techniques, sometimes called indeterminate music. Serial procedures were often applied to computer-generated music, and many serial musicians were also in the forefront of developing synthesizers and electronic music.
History of serial music
The serialization of rhythm, dynamics, and other elements of music developed after the Second World War by arguing that the twelve-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers of the Second Viennese School had serialized pitch, and was partly fostered by the work of Olivier Messiaen and his analysis students, including Karel Goeyvaerts and Boulez, in post-war Paris. Twelve-tone music is regarded by some as a sub-category of serialism, whereas others regard serialism to be an outgrowth of twelve-tone music.
Twelve tone music
In the early 20th century composers in the European classical tradition began searching for other ways to organize works of music other than reliance on the ordered system of chords and intervals known as tonality. Some composers seeking to extend this direction in music began to search for ways to compose systematically.
Just after the First World War, Schoenberg began writing pieces with 12-note motifs and using a procedure to "work with the notes of the motif". He compared this process to the contrapuntal rules deduced from the music of Bach, arguing that as Bach's rules produced tonality without referencing it, so his rules produced a new basic means of structuring music which was not yet understood.
While Schoenberg was concerned with the serial ordering of pitch, his student Anton Webern has been seen to use rows to regulate other aspects of music. With the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the implementation of "race laws" with regard to ownership, culture and employment, many of the main composers of 12-note music were placed on a list of Entartete musik ("Degenerate music"), the Nazi term for all music that they disapproved of.
Serialism invented and described
The period after World War II represents the codification of serialism as a body of theory.
After the Second World War, students of Olivier Messiaen saw Webern's structure, and Messiaen's techniques of parameterization as the next way forward in composition. They began creating individual sets or series for each element of music. They created the term serialism to describe what they were doing, and argued that the Twelve Tone works of Webern, Schoenberg and others were also "serial" works. To differentiate 12 tone works from those with other forms of parameterization, the term "multiple serialism" was used, and if all parameters were serially controlled total serialism. René Leibowitz, as composer, conductor, teacher and author was also influential in claiming the Second Viennese School as being the foundation for modern music.
Schoenberg's arrival in the US in 1933 helped accelerate the acceptance of both twelve tone music, and serialism more generally in American academia, at that time dominated by neo-classicism, though he himself felt his ideas were being discounted. Even before his death in 1951 two major theorists and composers, Milton Babbitt and George Perle, emerged as prominent figures actively involved with the analysis of serial music as well the creation of new works using sometimes radical extensions and revisions of the method. In many cases older composers were influenced to adopt tone rows or other serial procedures by their students, for example, Roger Sessions began to incorporate them in 1952, influenced by Milton Babbitt, who was his student.
In the late 1950s Allen Forte began working on ways to describe atonal harmony, and to combine the methods of Heinrich Schenker, who was an ardent opponent of such music, with the developments in what was then contemporary music. For example in 1964 he published an article entilted "A Theory of Set-Complexes for Music".
Serialism and high modernism
Serialism, along with John Cage's aleatoric music, was enormously influential in post-war music. Theorists such as George Perle codified serial systems, and his 1962 text Serial Composition and Atonality became a standard work on the origins of serial composition in the work of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.
Other composers to use serialism include Luigi Nono, who developed similar ideas separately, Roger Reynolds, and Charles Wuorinen, the later works of Igor Stravinsky and the early works of George Rochberg.
Several of the composers associated with Darmstadt, notably Karlheinz Stockhausen, Karel Goeyvaerts, and Henri Pousseur developed a form of serialism which initially rejected the recurring rows characteristic of twelve-tone technique, in order to eradicate any lingering traces of thematicism. Schoenberg wrote that the eradication of overt elements of traditional musical unity had been part of the avant-garde project in music since the first decade of the 20th century, and saw these developments as a fulfillment of a broader movement in modern art.
Integral serialism had demanded that all parameters in a work be treated as scaled sets (not necessarily in fixed successions) with an equal right to participate in the compositional process, but beginning in the mid-1950s, Stockhausen and others began to focus on "serial principles" as well as methods.
Stockhausen described the final synthesis, where proportions and intervals had replaced harmony (Cott 1973, ) and thematic manipulation in this manner:
So serial thinking is something that's come into our consciousness and will be there forever: it's relativity and nothing else. (Cott 1973, 101)Igor Stravinsky's adoption of serial techniques offers an example of the level of influence that serialism had after the Second World War. Because many of the basic techniques of serial compositon have analogs in traditional counterpoint, uses of inversion, retrograde and retrograde inversion from before the war are not necessarily indicative of Stravinsky adopting Schoenbergian techniques. However with his meeting Robert Craft and acquaintance with younger composers, Stravinsky began to consciously study Schoenberg's music, as well as the music of Webern and later composers, and began to use the techniques in his own work, using, for example, serial techniques applied to fewer than 12 notes. Adding to their professional tools of sonata form and tonality, scholars began to analyze previous works in the light of serial techniques;
Furthermore, the organizing principles of serialism inspired mathematical analogues, such as uses of set theory, group theory, operators, and parametrization, for example in the post-war works of Elliott Carter, Iannis Xenakis, and Witold Lutosławski. Likewise, the mathematical analogues in integral serialism were influential in the development of electronic music and synthesized music.
Serialism in the present
Reactions to and against serialism
Serialism never found wide favour with classical-music audiences, even though many composers adopted it in various forms. Some theorized that it would provide the basis for integration of electronic music and aleatoric music;
Part of the reason for the centrality of serialism in the debate over the meaning and direction of concert music is that it was far from alone in an attempt to systematize music, and root music theory in the modern age. This attempt to found music on a more axiomic and rigorous basis formed the background for the introduction of the theories of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In Europe, the style of some serial as well as non-serial music of that time emphasized the determination of all parameters for each note independently, often resulting in widely spaced, isolated "points" of sound, an effect called first in German "punktuelle Musik" ("pointist" or "punctual music"), then in French "musique ponctuelle", but quickly confused with pointillistic (German "pointillistische", French "pointilliste") the familiar term associated with the densely packed dots in paintings of Seurat, despite the fact that the conception was at the opposite extreme (Stockhausen and Frisius 1998, 451).
The debate was often decidedly uncollegial: serial and other forms of avant garde music were condemned as being "not music", while proponents such as Pierre Boulez argued that "music exists in the avant garde or not at all". In the words of Roger Scruton (1997), "the order that exists in [serial compositions] is not an order that can be heard, when we hear the sounds as music." Ideologies formed around what constituted progress in music, and the history of music was retold, from different viewpoints, either to support the inevitability of serialism, or conversely to ground tonality in immutable realities.
Some music theorists have criticized serialism on the basis that the compositional strategies employed are often incompatible with the way information is extracted by the human mind from a piece of music. Serialism also spawned a host of other attempts to incorporate process into music, including aleatory, or chance, music, and graphical notations which provided for wide ranging improvisation on the part of musicians. This might seem counter-intuitive given the assertion by many serial composers that serialism was about control over more and more of the score, but, in fact, it arose out of the desires for greater variety and texture to music, as expressed in the arguments in the 1950's over Total Serialism.
Within the community of modern music, exactly what constituted serialism was also a matter of debate. The conventional English usage is that the word "serial" applies to all 12-tone music, which is a "subset" of serial music, and it is this usage that is generally intended in reference works. Other practitioners of serial music argued that individual elements should not be under serial control, but instead under some form of stochastic patterning, or that the large scale of the composition should be under serial control, but individual events at the selection of the composer, or the performer.
Serialism, because of its focus on process, would give birth to process musics, for example of John Cage and the early Steve Reich works such as Drumming. Some process music would retain the concern for the "liberation of dissonance" that Schoenberg declared to be essential, while other composers would select largely consonant, or non-functionally dissonant materials.
Jazz artists in the middle of the 20th century began to work with serial and 12 tone techniques to expand the palette of jazz music. More recently there have been works like those of American guitarist Bruce Arnold who composes and improvises with 12 tone and serial techniques.
Even 75 years after its creation (or 55, depending on which version of history one subscribes to), serial music maintains its aura of being "difficult" and archetypically "modern". Critics routinely fall into stances which praise or condemn it as a category, and works composed using serial techniques are considered "daring" programming choices. However, for every assertion of uniqueness, there are also critics that argue that fundamentally the much of the music is "very late Romanticism" raised to a very high level, and that it should be played with the same eye to harmonic richness and musical aesthetic.
Theory of serial music
The vocabulary of serialism is rooted in set theory, and uses a quasi-mathematical language to describe how the basic sets are manipulated to produce the final result. Musical set theory is often used to analyze and compose serial music, but may also be used to study tonal music.
The basis for serial composition is Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, where the 12 notes of the basic chromatic scale are organized into a row.
Because there are tonal chord progressions which use all 12 notes, it is possible to create pitch rows with very strong tonal implications, and even to write tonal music using 12-tone technique, but this is not the norm. a composer can create music centered on one or more of the row's constituent pitches by emphasizing or avoiding these subsets, respectively, as well as through other, more complex compositional devices (Newlin 1974;
To serialize other elements of music, a system quantifying an identifiable element must be created or defined (this is called "parametrization", after the term in mathematics).
The selected set or sets, their permutations and derived sets form the basic material with which the composer works. Some serial works specify as little as possible, to give the composer the maximum amount of freedom when working, other works attempt to pre-compose as much as possible, which, taken to its limit is referred to as automatism.
Composition using 12-tone serial methods focuses on each appearance of the collection of twelve chromatic notes, called an aggregate. The presentation of an aggregate corresponds to units of music in common practice harmony, in that when the listener has heard all of the materials of the aggregate, they know that new presentation of the aggregate should be expected to begin, with its own combinatorial presentation.
Important composers
See also: List of pieces which use serialism.
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