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Serialism is a term from the music theory of European classical music. It is a set of methods for composing and analyzing works of music based on structuring a work of music around the parameterization of parts of music, that is using numerical values for pitch, dynamics, instrumentation and rhythm, ordering them into a row or series. In principle a pitch, dynamic, colour or rhythmic element should be used in its order in the series. The series is then manipulated by various means to produce musical material. It is often applied to twelve tone music, but was developed after the Second World War as a means of combining the Second Vienna School and the work of Oliver Messiaen.

Serialism became the favored means of expression for high Modernism beginning around 1950, and continued to be regarded in academia as the most important theory of musical construction for the next decades. It would be the basis for integration of electronic music and aletatoric music. It never found wide favor with classical audiences, even though many composers adopted it. The reaction against Serialism would become a matter of controversy in musical circles, producing such movements as Minimalism (music) and Neo-Romanticism.

Important serialist composers includ Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and Mario Davidovsky. Many composers wrote serial pieces, including Aaron Copland.

Basic definition

Serialism is most specifically defined 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 the what Arnold Schoenberg called "The Method of Composing with Twelve Tones related only to one another", or dodecaphony. 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. Serialism has been described by its practioners as an extension and formalisation of earlier methods of 'cellular' thematic and motivic unification in classical and romantic music. This extension and formalisation is seen as having been motivated by the intensifying drive towards chromatic saturation and the resulting need to unify without using tonality.

Most serial music is deliberately structured as such. A row may be assembled 'pre-compositionally' (perhaps to embody particular intervallic or symmetrical properties), or it may be derived from a spontaneously invented thematic or motivic idea. Composing a serial work involves continually re-rhythmicising the various reappearances of the row in its Original, Retrograde, Inverted and Retrograde-Inverted forms as these are distributed through the various elements of the texture and employed to create accompaniments and subordinate parts as well as the main themes; each of these forms may also be transposed to begin on any note of the chromatic scale.

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. The basic set is usually required to have certain properties, and may have additional restrictions, such as the requirement that it use each interval only once. The most common requirement is that first half and second half of the row not be inversions of each other.

History of Serial 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. Many composers used modal organization, and others began to use alternate scales withina tonal context provided by jazz. There was an increasing movement to avoid any particular chord as being central, which was described as atonal or pantonal. 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 motives and using a procedure to "work with the notes of the motive". He analogized this process to the contrapunctal rules 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 von Webern began to relate other aspects of music to the basic row.

The politics of Nazi Germany intruded into the development of the musical idea. With the rise to power of Adolph Hitler and the implmentation of "race laws" with regard to ownership, culture and employment, many of the main composers of 12 music were placed on a list of Entrarte musik, the Nazi term for all music that they disapproved of. There were two reasons, one was simply the nature of the composers as "jewish", the other was the Nazi ideas of art as part of the propaganda arm of the state. Avant-garde forms of art were thus banned, even if the artist was a political adherent of Nazism. With this regime's rise, Arnold Schoenberg fled to America in 1933, and his works, and the works of his students Alban Berg and Anton von Webern were banned.

Serialism invented and described

After the Second World War, students of Oliver 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. The elements thus serially determined included the duration of notes, their dynamics, their orchestration, and many others. 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 differential 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. Because of the Nazi repression, some young composers took serialism to be the advancing the cause of Anti-fascism. These included Stockhausen and Boulez. Rene Lebowitz was also influential in placing the Second Vienna School as being the foundation for modern music. From these figures emerged two influential schools, the School of Paris around Pierre Boulez and a German school around Stockhausen.

Schoenberg's arrival in the US 1933 helped accelerate the acceptance in American academia, at that time dominated by neo-classicism. 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 after the Second World War.

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. Declaring itself "revolutionary" and "a new tonality", serialism created an environment where experimentation with sound, in a manner similar to the exploration of pure painting in Abstract Expressionism was at the forefront of composition, which led to increased use of electronics and other applications of mathematical notation to composition, developed by theorists such as the composer and mathematician Milton Babbitt.

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. Major centers for serialism were the Darmstadt School and the "School of Paris" centered around Pierre Boulez.

Serialism in the present

Reactions to and against serialism

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. According to Boulez, "Classical tonal thought is based on a world defined by gravitation and attraction, serial thought on a world which is perpetually expanding." The latter types of metaphors-- which seek to closely associate contemporary art with contemporary science-- are typical of mid-twentieth century Modern composers.

Source

• Musical techniques
• Modernism