In music, serialism is a method of
composition using series of pitches, rhythms, dynamics, timbres or other
musical elements
Musical is the adjective of music.
Musical may also refer to:
* Musical theatre, a performance art that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting and dance
* Musical film and television, a genre of film and television that incorporates into the nar ...
. Serialism began primarily with
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (, ; ; 13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was as ...
's
twelve-tone technique, though some of his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as a form of
post-tonal thinking. Twelve-tone technique orders the twelve notes of the
chromatic scale, forming a
row
Row or ROW may refer to:
Exercise
*Rowing, or a form of aquatic movement using oars
*Row (weight-lifting), a form of weight-lifting exercise
Math
*Row vector, a 1 × ''n'' matrix in linear algebra.
*Row (database), a single, implicitly structured ...
or series and providing a unifying basis for a composition's
melody
A melody (from Greek language, Greek μελῳδία, ''melōidía'', "singing, chanting"), also tune, voice or line, is a Linearity#Music, linear succession of musical tones that the listener perceives as a single entity. In its most liter ...
,
harmony
In music, harmony is the process by which individual sounds are joined together or composed into whole units or compositions. Often, the term harmony refers to simultaneously occurring frequencies, pitches ( tones, notes), or chords. However ...
, structural progressions, and
variations. Other types of serialism also work with
sets, collections of objects, but not necessarily with fixed-order series, and extend the technique to other musical dimensions (often called "
parameters"), such as
duration,
dynamics, and
timbre.
The idea of serialism is also applied in various ways in the
visual arts,
design, and
architecture, and the musical concept has also been adapted in literature.
Integral serialism or total serialism is the use of series for aspects such as duration, dynamics, and register as well as pitch. Other terms, used especially in Europe to distinguish post-World War II serial music from twelve-tone music and its American extensions, are general serialism and multiple serialism.
Composers such as Arnold Schoenberg,
Anton Webern,
Alban Berg
Alban Maria Johannes Berg ( , ; 9 February 1885 – 24 December 1935) was an Austrian composer of the Second Viennese School. His compositional style combined Romantic lyricism with the twelve-tone technique. Although he left a relatively sma ...
,
Karlheinz Stockhausen,
Pierre Boulez
Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez (; 26 March 1925 – 5 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor and writer, and the founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of post-war Western classical music.
Born in Mont ...
,
Luigi Nono,
Milton Babbitt
Milton Byron Babbitt (May 10, 1916 – January 29, 2011) was an American composer, music theorist, mathematician, and teacher. He is particularly noted for his Serialism, serial and electronic music.
Biography
Babbitt was born in Philadelphia t ...
,
Elisabeth Lutyens,
Henri Pousseur,
Charles Wuorinen
Charles Peter Wuorinen (; June 9, 1938 – March 11, 2020) was an American composer of contemporary classical music based in New York City. He performed his works and other 20th-century music as pianist and conductor.
He composed more than ...
and
Jean Barraqué used serial techniques of one sort or another in most of their music. Other composers such as
Tadeusz Baird,
Béla Bartók
Béla Viktor János Bartók (; ; 25 March 1881 – 26 September 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as H ...
,
Luciano Berio,
Benjamin Britten,
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading fi ...
,
Aaron Copland,
Ernst Krenek,
György Ligeti,
Olivier Messiaen
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex; harmonically ...
,
Arvo Pärt
Arvo Pärt (; born 11 September 1935) is an Estonian composer of contemporary classical music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs tintinnabuli, a compositional technique he invented. Pärt's music is in pa ...
,
Walter Piston,
Ned Rorem,
Alfred Schnittke,
Ruth Crawford Seeger,
Dmitri Shostakovich
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, , group=n (9 August 1975) was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist who became internationally known after the premiere of his Symphony No. 1 (Shostakovich), First Symphony in 1926 and was regarded throug ...
, and
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (6 April 1971) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor, later of French (from 1934) and American (from 1945) citizenship. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the ...
used serialism only in some of their compositions or only in some sections of pieces, as did some
jazz composers, such as
Bill Evans
William John Evans (August 16, 1929 – September 15, 1980) was an American jazz pianist and composer who worked primarily as the leader of his trio. His use of impressionist harmony, interpretation of traditional jazz repertoire, block ch ...
,
Yusef Lateef, and
Bill Smith.
Basic definitions
Serialism is a method, "highly specialized technique", or "way" of
composition. It may also be considered "a philosophy of life (''
Weltanschauung''), a way of relating the human mind to the world and creating a completeness when dealing with a subject".
Serialism is not by itself a system of composition or a style. Neither is pitch serialism necessarily incompatible with tonality, though it is most often used as a means of composing
atonal music.
"Serial music" is a problematic term because it is used differently in different languages and especially because, shortly after its coinage in French, it underwent essential alterations during its transmission to German. The term's use in connection with music was first introduced in French by
René Leibowitz in 1947, and immediately afterward by
Humphrey Searle in English, as an alternative translation of the German (
twelve-tone technique) or (row music); it was independently introduced by Stockhausen and
Herbert Eimert Herbert Eimert (8 April 1897 – 15 December 1972) was a German music theorist, musicologist, journalist, music critic, editor, radio producer, and composer.
Education
Herbert Eimert was born in Bad Kreuznach. He studied music theory and compo ...
into German in 1955 as , with a different meaning, but also translated as "serial music".
Twelve-tone serialism
Serialism of the first type is most specifically defined as a structural principle according to which a recurring series of ordered elements (normally a
set—or
row
Row or ROW may refer to:
Exercise
*Rowing, or a form of aquatic movement using oars
*Row (weight-lifting), a form of weight-lifting exercise
Math
*Row vector, a 1 × ''n'' matrix in linear algebra.
*Row (database), a single, implicitly structured ...
—of pitches or
pitch classes) is used in order or manipulated in particular ways to give a piece unity. "Serial" is often broadly used to describe all music written in what Schoenberg called "The Method of Composing with Twelve Notes related only to one another", or
dodecaphony
The twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and (in British usage) twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition first devised by Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer, who published his "law o ...
, and methods that evolved from his methods. It is sometimes used more specifically to apply only to music in which at least one element other than pitch is treated as a row or series. Such methods are often called ''post-Webernian serialism''. Other terms used to make the distinction are ''twelve-note serialism'' for the former and ''integral serialism'' for the latter.
A row may be assembled pre-compositionally (perhaps to embody particular intervallic or symmetrical properties), or derived from a spontaneously invented thematic or motivic idea. The row's structure does not in itself define the structure of a composition, which requires development of a comprehensive strategy. The choice of strategy often depends on the relationships contained in a row class, and rows may be constructed with an eye to producing the relationships needed to form desired strategies.
The basic set may have additional restrictions, such as the requirement that it use each
interval only once.
Non-twelve-tone serialism
"The series is not an order of succession, but indeed a hierarchy—which may be independent of this order of succession".
Rules of analysis derived from twelve-tone theory do not apply to serialism of the second type: "in particular the ideas, one, that the series is an intervallic sequence, and two, that the rules are consistent". For example, Stockhausen's early serial works, such as ''
Kreuzspiel'' and ''
Formel'', "advance in unit sections within which a preordained set of pitches is repeatedly reconfigured ... The composer's model for the distributive serial process corresponds to a development of the Zwölftonspiel of Josef Matthias Hauer". Goeyvaerts's ''Nummer 4''
provides a classic illustration of the distributive function of seriality: 4 times an equal number of elements of equal duration within an equal global time is distributed in the most equable way, unequally with regard to one another, over the temporal space: from the greatest possible coïncidence to the greatest possible dispersion. This provides an exemplary demonstration of that logical principle of seriality: ''every situation must occur once and only once''.
Henri Pousseur, after initially working with twelve-tone technique in works like ''Sept Versets'' (1950) and ''Trois Chants sacrés'' (1951),
evolved away from this bond in ''Symphonies pour quinze Solistes'' 954–55and in the ''Quintette'' 'à la mémoire d’Anton Webern'', 1955 and from around the time of ''Impromptu'' 955encounters whole new dimensions of application and new functions.
The twelve-tone series loses its imperative function as a prohibiting, regulating, and patterning authority; its working-out is abandoned through its own constant-frequent presence: all 66 intervallic relations among the 12 pitches being virtually present. Prohibited intervals, like the octave, and prohibited successional relations, such as premature note repetitions, frequently occur, although obscured in the dense contexture. The number twelve no longer plays any governing, defining rôle; the pitch constellations no longer hold to the limitation determined by their formation. The dodecaphonic series loses its significance as a concrete model of shape (or a well-defined collection of concrete shapes) is played out. And the chromatic total remains active only, and provisionally, as a general reference.
In the 1960s Pousseur took this a step further, applying a consistent set of predefined transformations to preexisting music. One example is the large orchestral work ''Couleurs croisées'' (''Crossed Colours'', 1967), which performs these transformations on the protest song "
We Shall Overcome", creating a succession of different situations that are sometimes chromatic and dissonant and sometimes diatonic and consonant. In his opera ''
Votre Faust
' (Your Faust) is an opera (or, more precisely, a "variable fantasy in the style of an opera") in two acts by the Belgian composer Henri Pousseur, for five actors, four singers, twelve instrumentalists, and tape. The text is by the French author ...
'' (''Your Faust'', 1960–68) Pousseur used many quotations, themselves arranged into a "scale" for serial treatment. This "generalised" serialism (in the strongest possible sense) aims not to exclude any musical phenomena, no matter how heterogeneous, in order "to control the effects of tonal determinism, dialectize its causal functions, and overcome any academic prohibitions, especially the fixing of an anti-grammar meant to replace some previous one".
At about the same time, Stockhausen began using serial methods to integrate a variety of musical sources from recorded examples of folk and traditional music from around the world in his electronic composition ''
Telemusik'' (1966), and from
national anthems in ''
Hymnen'' (1966–67). He extended this serial "polyphony of styles" in a series of "process-plan" works in the late 1960s, as well as later in portions of ''
Licht
file:Kürten - Waldfriedhof - Stockhausen 01 ies.jpg, 275px, Karlheinz Stockhausens grave with the score to LICHT .
''Licht'' (Light), subtitled "Die sieben Tage der Woche" (The Seven Days of the Week), is a cycle of seven operas composed by Kar ...
'', the cycle of seven operas he composed between 1977 and 2003.
History of serial music
Before World War II
In the late 19th and early 20th century, composers began to struggle against the ordered system of chords and intervals known as "functional
tonality". Composers such as Debussy and Strauss found ways to stretch the limits of the tonal system to accommodate their ideas. After a brief period of free atonality, Schoenberg and others began exploring tone rows, in which an ordering of the 12 pitches of the equal-tempered chromatic scale is used as the source material of a composition. This ordered set, often called a row, allowed for new forms of expression and (unlike free atonality) the expansion of underlying structural organizing principles without recourse to common practice harmony.
Twelve-tone serialism first appeared in the 1920s, with antecedents predating that decade (instances of 12-note passages occur in Liszt's ''
Faust Symphony'' and in Bach.) Schoenberg was the composer most decisively involved in devising and demonstrating the fundamentals of twelve-tone serialism, though it is clear it is not the work of just one musician. In Schoenberg’s own words, his goal of was to show constraint in composition. Consequently, some reviewers have jumped to the conclusion that serialism acted as a predetermined method of composing to avoid the subjectivity and ego of a composer in favour of calculated measure and proportion.
After World War II
Along with
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading fi ...
's
indeterminate music (music composed with the use of chance operations) and
Werner Meyer-Eppler's
aleatoricism, serialism was enormously influential in postwar music. Theorists such as
Milton Babbitt
Milton Byron Babbitt (May 10, 1916 – January 29, 2011) was an American composer, music theorist, mathematician, and teacher. He is particularly noted for his Serialism, serial and electronic music.
Biography
Babbitt was born in Philadelphia t ...
and
George Perle codified serial systems, leading to a mode of composition called "total serialism", in which every aspect of a piece, not just pitch, is serially constructed. Perle's 1962 text ''Serial Composition and Atonality'' became a standard work on the origins of serial composition in the music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern.
The serialization of
rhythm,
dynamics, and other elements of music was partly fostered by the work of Olivier Messiaen and his analysis students, including
Karel Goeyvaerts and Boulez, in postwar
Paris. Messiaen first used a chromatic rhythm scale in his ''
Vingt Regards sur l'enfant-Jésus'' (1944), but he did not employ a rhythmic series until 1946–48, in the seventh movement, "Turangalîla II", of his ''
Turangalîla-Symphonie''. The first examples of such integral serialism are Babbitt's ''Three Compositions for Piano'' (1947), ''
Composition for Four Instruments'' (1948), and ''
Composition for Twelve Instruments'' (1948). He worked independently of the Europeans.
Several of the composers associated with Darmstadt, notably Stockhausen, Goeyvaerts, and Pousseur, developed a form of serialism that initially rejected the recurring rows characteristic of twelve-tone technique in order to eradicate any lingering traces of
thematicism. Instead of a recurring, referential row, "each musical component is subjected to control by a series of numerical proportions". In Europe, some serial and non-serial music of the early 1950s 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 term associated with the densely packed dots in
Seurat's paintings, even though the concept was unrelated.
Pieces were structured by closed sets of proportions, a method closely related to certain works from the
de Stijl and
Bauhaus movements in design and architecture some writers called "
serial art
Serial may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media The presentation of works in sequential segments
* Serial (literature), serialised literature in print
* Serial (publishing), periodical publications and newspapers
* Serial (radio and televisi ...
", specifically the paintings of
Piet Mondrian
Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (), after 1906 known as Piet Mondrian (, also , ; 7 March 1872 – 1 February 1944), was a Dutch painter and art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He is known for being ...
,
Theo van Doesburg, Bart van Leck, Georg van Tongerloo, Richard Paul Lohse, and
Burgoyne Diller
Burgoyne A. Diller (January 13, 1906 – January 30, 1965) was an American abstract painter. Many of his best-known works are characterized by orthogonal geometric forms that reflect his strong interest in the De Stijl movement and the work of ...
, who had sought to "avoid repetition and symmetry on all structural levels and working with a limited number of elements".
Stockhausen described the final synthesis 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. It just says: Use all the components of any given number of elements, don't leave out individual elements, use them all with equal importance and try to find an equidistant scale so that certain steps are no larger than others. It's a spiritual and democratic attitude toward the world. The stars are organized in a serial way. Whenever you look at a certain star sign you find a limited number of elements with different intervals. If we more thoroughly studied the distances and proportions of the stars we'd probably find certain relationships of multiples based on some logarithmic scale or whatever the scale may be.
Stravinsky's adoption of twelve-tone serial techniques shows the level of influence serialism had after the Second World War. Previously Stravinsky had used series of notes without rhythmic or harmonic implications. Because many of the basic techniques of serial composition have analogs in traditional counterpoint, uses of
inversion,
retrograde, and
retrograde inversion from before the war do not necessarily indicate Stravinsky was adopting Schoenbergian techniques. But after meeting
Robert Craft and other younger composers, Stravinsky began to study Schoenberg's music, as well as that of Webern and later composers, and to adapt their techniques in his work, using, for example, serial techniques applied to fewer than twelve notes. During the 1950s he used procedures related to Messiaen, Webern and Berg. While it is inaccurate to call them all "serial" in the strict sense, all his major works of the period have clear serialist elements.
During this period, the concept of serialism influenced not only new compositions but also scholarly analysis of the classical masters. Adding to their professional tools of
sonata form and
tonality, scholars began to analyze previous works in the light of serial techniques; for example, they found the use of row technique in previous composers going back to Mozart and Beethoven. In particular, the orchestral outburst that introduces the
development section halfway through the last movement of
Mozart's Symphony No. 40 is a tone row that Mozart punctuates in a very modern and violent way that
Michael Steinberg called "rude octaves and frozen silences".
Ruth Crawford Seeger extended serial control to parameters other than pitch and to formal planning as early as 1930–33 in a fashion that goes beyond Webern but was less thoroughgoing than the later practices of Babbitt and European postwar composers.
Charles Ives
Charles Edward Ives (; October 20, 1874May 19, 1954) was an American modernist composer, one of the first American composers of international renown. His music was largely ignored during his early career, and many of his works went unperformed f ...
's 1906 song "The Cage" begins with piano chords presented in incrementally decreasing durations, an early example of an overtly arithmetic duration series independent of meter (like Nono's six-element row shown above), and in that sense a precursor to Messiaen’s style of integral serialism. The idea of organizing pitch and rhythm according to similar or related principles is also suggested by both
Henry Cowell
Henry Dixon Cowell (; March 11, 1897 – December 10, 1965) was an American composer, writer, pianist, publisher and teacher. Marchioni, Tonimarie (2012)"Henry Cowell: A Life Stranger Than Fiction" ''The Juilliard Journal''. Retrieved 19 June 202 ...
's ''New Musical Resources'' (1930) and the work of
Joseph Schillinger.
Reactions to serialism
Some music theorists have criticized serialism on the basis that its compositional strategies are often incompatible with the way the human mind processes a piece of music.
Nicolas Ruwet (1959) was one of the first to criticise serialism by a comparison with linguistic structures, citing theoretical claims by Boulez and Pousseur, taking as specific examples bars from Stockhausen's ''
Klavierstücke I & II'', and calling for a general reexamination of Webern's music. Ruwet specifically names three works as exempt from his criticism: Stockhausen's ''
Zeitmaße'' and ''
Gruppen'', and Boulez's ''
Le marteau sans maître''.
In response, Pousseur questioned Ruwet's equivalence between phonemes and notes. He also suggested that, if analysis of ''Le marteau sans maître'' and ''Zeitmaße'', "performed with sufficient insight", were to be made from the point of view of
wave theory
In historical linguistics, the wave model or wave theory (German ''Wellentheorie'') is a model of language change in which a new language feature (innovation) or a new combination of language features spreads from its region of origin, affecting ...
—taking into account the dynamic interaction of the different component phenomena, which creates "waves" that interact in a sort of
frequency modulation—the analysis "would accurately reflect the realities of perception". This was because these composers had long since acknowledged the lack of differentiation found in punctual music and, becoming increasingly aware of the laws of perception and complying better with them, "paved the way to a more effective kind of musical communication, without in the least abandoning the emancipation that they had been allowed to achieve by this 'zero state' that was punctual music". One way this was achieved was by developing the concept of "groups", which allows structural relationships to be defined not only between individual notes but also at higher levels, up to the overall form of a piece. This is "a structural method par excellence", and a sufficiently simple conception that it remains easily perceptible. Pousseur also points out that serial composers were the first to recognize and attempt to move beyond the lack of differentiation within certain pointillist works. Pousseur later followed up on his own suggestion by developing his idea of "wave" analysis and applying it to Stockhausen's ''Zeitmaße'' in two essays.
Later writers have continued both lines of reasoning.
Fred Lerdahl, for example, in his essay "
Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems "Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems" is an essay by Fred Lerdahl that cites Pierre Boulez's ''Le Marteau sans maître'' (1955) as an example of "a huge gap between compositional system and cognized result," though he "could have illustra ...
", argues that serialism's perceptual opacity ensures its aesthetic inferiority. Lerdahl has in turn been criticized for excluding "the possibility of other, non-hierarchical methods of achieving musical coherence," and for concentrating on the audibility of tone rows, and the portion of his essay focusing on Boulez's "multiplication" technique (exemplified in three movements of ''Le Marteau sans maître'') has been challenged on perceptual grounds by Stephen Heinemann and Ulrich Mosch. Ruwet's critique has also been criticised for making "the fatal mistake of equating visual presentation (a score) with auditive presentation (the music as heard)".
In all these reactions discussed above, the "information extracted", "perceptual opacity", "auditive presentation" (and constraints thereof) pertain to what defines serialism, namely use of a series. And since Schoenberg remarked, "in the later part of a work, when the set
erieshad already become familiar to the ear", it has been assumed that serial composers expect their series to be aurally perceived. This principle even became the premise of empirical investigation in the guise of "probe-tone" experiments testing listeners' familiarity with a row after exposure to its various forms (as would occur in a 12-tone work). In other words the supposition in critiques of serialism has been that, if a composition is so intricately structured by and around a series, that series should ultimately be clearly perceived or that a listener ought to become aware of its presence or importance. Babbitt denied this:
Seemingly in accord with Babbitt's statement, but ranging over such issues as perception, aesthetic value, and the "poietic fallacy", Walter Horn offers a more extensive explanation of the serialism (and atonality) controversy.
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 twelve-tone music, which is a subset of serial music, and it is this usage that is generally intended in reference works. Nevertheless, a large body of music exists that is called "serial" but does not employ note-rows at all, let alone twelve-tone technique, e.g., Stockhausen's ''Klavierstücke I–IV'' (which use permuted sets), his ''
Stimmung'' (with pitches from the
overtone series, which is also used as the model for the rhythms), and Pousseur's ''
Scambi
''Scambi'' (Exchanges) is an electronic music composition by the Belgian composer Henri Pousseur, realized in 1957 at the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano.
History
''Scambi'' is Pousseur's second electronic-music work, following ''Seis ...
'' (where the permuted sounds are made exclusively from filtered
white noise).
When serialism is not limited to twelve-tone techniques, a contributing problem is that the word "serial" is seldom if ever defined. In many published analyses of individual pieces the term is used while actual meaning is skated around.
Theory of twelve-tone serial music
Due to Babbitt's work, in the mid-20th century serialist thought became rooted in set theory and began to use a quasi-mathematical vocabulary for the manipulation of the basic sets. Musical
set theory is often used to analyze and compose serial music, and is also sometimes used in tonal and nonserial atonal analysis.
The basis for serial composition is Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, where the 12 notes of the chromatic scale are organized into a row. This "basic" row is then used to create permutations, that is, rows derived from the basic set by reordering its elements. The row may be used to produce a set of intervals, or a composer may derive the row from a particular succession of intervals. A row that uses all of the intervals in their ascending form once is an
all-interval row. In addition to permutations, the basic row may have some set of notes derived from it, which is used to create a new row. These are ''derived sets''.
Because there are tonal chord progressions that use all twelve notes, it is possible to create pitch rows with very strong tonal implications, and even to write tonal music using twelve-tone technique. Most tone rows contain subsets that can imply a
pitch center; 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.
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). For example, if duration is serialized, a set of durations must be specified; if
tone colour
In music, timbre ( ), also known as tone color or tone quality (from psychoacoustics), is the perceived sound quality of a musical note, sound or tone. Timbre distinguishes different types of sound production, such as choir voices and musical ...
(timbre) is serialized, a set of separate tone colours must be identified; and so on.
The selected set or sets, their permutations and derived sets form the composer's basic material.
Composition using twelve-tone serial methods focuses on each appearance of the collection of twelve chromatic notes, called an
aggregate
Aggregate or aggregates may refer to:
Computing and mathematics
* collection of objects that are bound together by a root entity, otherwise known as an aggregate root. The aggregate root guarantees the consistency of changes being made within the ...
. (Sets of more or fewer pitches, or of elements other than pitch, may be treated analogously.) One principle operative in some serial compositions is that no element of the aggregate should be reused in the same contrapuntal strand (statement of a series) until all the other members have been used, and each member must appear only in its place in the series. Yet, since most serial compositions have multiple (at least two, sometimes as many as a few dozen) series statements occurring concurrently, interwoven with each other in time, and feature repetitions of some of their pitches, this principle as stated is more a referential abstraction than a description of the concrete reality of a musical work that is termed "serial".
A series may be divided into subsets, and the members of the aggregate not part of a subset are said to be its ''complement''. A subset is ''self-complementing'' if it contains half of the set and its complement is also a permutation of the original subset. This is most commonly seen with ''hexachords'', six-note segments of a tone row. A hexachord that is self-complementing for a particular permutation is called ''prime combinatorial''. A hexachord that is self-complementing for all the canonic operations—
inversion,
retrograde, and
retrograde inversion—is called ''all-combinatorial''.
Notable composers
*
Hans Abrahamsen
Hans Abrahamsen (born 23 December 1952) is a Danish composer born in Kongens Lyngby near Copenhagen. His '' Let me tell you'' (2013), a song cycle for soprano and orchestra, was ranked by music critics at ''The Guardian'' as the finest work of t ...
*
Gilbert Amy
*
Louis Andriessen
*
Denis ApIvor
*
Hans Erich Apostel
*
Kees van Baaren
*
Milton Babbitt
Milton Byron Babbitt (May 10, 1916 – January 29, 2011) was an American composer, music theorist, mathematician, and teacher. He is particularly noted for his Serialism, serial and electronic music.
Biography
Babbitt was born in Philadelphia t ...
*
Tadeusz Baird
*
Osvaldas Balakauskas
*
Don Banks
*
Jean Barraqué
*
Jürg Baur
Jürg Baur (11 November 1918 – 31 January 2010) was a German composer whose works include ''Incontri and Mutazioni.'' Baur studied at the Cologne University of Music and taught there in his later years. Baur was also awarded the Federal Cross ...
*
Alban Berg
Alban Maria Johannes Berg ( , ; 9 February 1885 – 24 December 1935) was an Austrian composer of the Second Viennese School. His compositional style combined Romantic lyricism with the twelve-tone technique. Although he left a relatively sma ...
*
Gunnar Berg
*
Arthur Berger
*
Erik Bergman
*
Luciano Berio
*
Karl-Birger Blomdahl
*
Konrad Boehmer
*
Rob du Bois
*
André Boucourechliev
*
Pierre Boulez
Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez (; 26 March 1925 – 5 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor and writer, and the founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of post-war Western classical music.
Born in Mont ...
*
Martin Boykan
*
Ole Buck
Ole Buck (born 1 February 1945, in Copenhagen) is a Danish composer.
He studied the piano from the age of twelve. He also made many early attempts at orchestral composition, eventually achieving a breakthrough at the age of 20 with ''Calligraphy' ...
*
Jacques Calonne
Jacques Calonne (10 August 1930 – 7 February 2022) was a Belgian artist, composer, singer, actor, logogramist, and writer.
Life
Born in Mons, Calonne studied music from 1944 until 1946 at the conservatories of Mons and Brussels, with amongst ...
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Niccolò Castiglioni
*
Aldo Clementi
*
Salvador Contreras
Salvador Contreras Sánchez (10 November 1910 – 7 November 1982) was a Mexican composer and violinist, a member of the Grupo de los cuatro.
Life
Contreras was born in Cuerámaro, Guanajuato, the son of José Contreras and Nemoria Sánchez. H ...
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Aaron Copland
*
Luigi Dallapiccola
*
Franco Donatoni
*
Hanns Eisler
*
Manuel Enríquez
Manuel Enríquez Salazar (17 June 1926 – 26 April 1994) was a Mexican composer, violinist and pedagogue. He was a fellow member of the Academy of Arts of Mexico, of the National Seminary of Mexican Culture and the music director of the Nationa ...
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Karlheinz Essl
*
Franco Evangelisti
*
Brian Ferneyhough
Brian John Peter Ferneyhough (; born 16 January 1943) is an English composer. Ferneyhough is typically considered the central figure of the New Complexity movement. Ferneyhough has taught composition at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg and ...
*
Jacobo Ficher
Jacobo Ficher (russian: Яков (Хакобо) Фишер; 15 January 1896 – 9 September 1978) was an Argentine composer, violinist, conductor, and music educator of Russian birth.
Life
Ficher was born in Odessa, Russia, to Alexander Ficher, a ...
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Irving Fine
*
Wolfgang Fortner
*
Roberto Gerhard
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Frans Geysen
*
Michael Gielen
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Alberto Ginastera
Alberto Evaristo Ginastera (; April 11, 1916June 25, 1983) was an Argentinian composer of classical music. He is considered to be one of the most important 20th-century classical composers of the Americas.
Biography
Ginastera was born in Buen ...
*
Lucien Goethals
Lucien Goethals (26 June 1931 – 12 December 2006) was a Belgian composer.
Life
Lucien Goethals was born in Ghent, but spent his formative years in Argentina, where he studied at the Dima Conservatory of Buenos Aires. When he returned to ...
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Karel Goeyvaerts
*
Jerry Goldsmith
*
Henryk Górecki
*
Glenn Gould
*
Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen
*
César Guerra-Peixe
*
Lou Harrison
*
Jonathan Harvey
*
Josef Matthias Hauer
*
Paavo Heininen
*
Hermann Heiss
*
Hans Werner Henze
*
York Höller
*
Heinz Holliger
*
Bill Hopkins
*
Klaus Huber
*
Karel Husa
*
Hanns Jelinek
*
Ben Johnston
*
Nikolai Karetnikov
*
Rudolf Kelterborn
*
Gottfried Michael Koenig
*
Józef Koffler
Józef Koffler (28 November 18961944) was a Polish composer, music teacher, musicologist and musical columnist.
He was the first Polish composer living before the Second World War to apply the twelve-tone composition technique (dodecaphony).
...
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Ernst Krenek
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Meyer Kupferman
*
René Leibowitz
*
Ingvar Lidholm
Ingvar Natanael Lidholm (24 February 1921 – 17 October 2017) was a Swedish composer.
Early years: 1921–1940
Ingvar Lidholm was born in Jönköping. The actual family home was in Nässjö, some 40 kilometers to the southeast. Neither of his pa ...
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Witold Lutosławski
*
Elisabeth Lutyens
*
John McGuire
*
Bruno Maderna
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Ursula Mamlok
*
Philippe Manoury
*
Donald Martino
*
Paul Méfano
*
Jacques-Louis Monod
Jacques-Louis Monod (25 February 1927 – 21 September 2020) was a French composer, pianist and conducting, conductor of 20th century music, 20th century and Contemporary classical music, contemporary music, particularly in the advancement of th ...
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Robert Morris
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Luigi Nono
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Per Nørgård
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Krzysztof Penderecki
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Goffredo Petrassi
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Michel Philippot Michel Paul Philippot (2 February 1925 – 28 July 1996) was a French composer, mathematician, acoustician, musicologist, aesthetician, broadcaster, and educator.
Life
Philippot was born in Verzy. His studies of mathematics were interrupted by Wo ...
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Walter Piston
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Henri Pousseur
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Einojuhani Rautavaara
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Roger Reynolds
*
Terry Riley
*
George Rochberg
*
Leonard Rosenman
*
Cláudio Santoro
Cláudio Franco de Sá Santoro (23 November 1919 – 27 March 1989) was an internationally renowned Brazilian composer, conductor and violinist.
Biography Early life
A native of Manaus, the capital of Amazonas, Santoro started to study violi ...
*
Peter Schat
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Leon Schidlowsky
Jorge León Schidlowsky Gaete (; 21 July 1931 – 10 October 2022) was a Chilean-Israeli composer and painter. He wrote music for orchestra, chamber ensemble, choir, and instruments including the piano, violin, cello, flute, mandolin, guitar, ha ...
*
Dieter Schnebel
Dieter Schnebel (14 March 1930 – 20 May 2018) was a German composer, theologian and musicologist. He composed orchestral music, chamber music, vocal music and stage works. From 1976 until his retirement in 1995, Schnebel served as professor of e ...
*
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (, ; ; 13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was as ...
, considered the founder of serialism
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Humphrey Searle
*
Ruth Crawford Seeger
*
Mátyás Seiber
*
Roger Sessions
*
Nikos Skalkottas
*
Roger Smalley
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Ann Southam
Ann Southam, (4 February 1937 – 25 November 2010) was a Canadian electronic and classical music composer and music teacher. She is known for her minimalist, iterative, and lyrical style, for her long-term collaborations with dance choreogra ...
*
Leopold Spinner
Leopold Spinner (26 April 1906 – 12 August 1980) was an Austrian-born, British-domiciled composer and editor.
Biography
Spinner was born of Austrian parentage in Lemberg (now Lviv, the Ukraine, Lwów, Poland during the interwar period). From 19 ...
*
Karlheinz Stockhausen
*
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (6 April 1971) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor, later of French (from 1934) and American (from 1945) citizenship. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the ...
*
Robert Suderburg
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Richard Swift
*
Louise Talma
Louise Juliette Talma (October 31, 1906August 13, 1996) was an American composer, academic, and pianist. After studies in New York and in France, piano with Isidor Philipp and composition with Nadia Boulanger, she focused on composition from 193 ...
*
Camillo Togni
*
Gilles Tremblay
*
Fartein Valen
*
Wladimir Vogel
*
Anton Webern
*
Hugo Weisgall
*
Peter Westergaard
*
Stefan Wolpe
Stefan Wolpe (25 August 1902, Berlin – 4 April 1972, New York City) was a German-Jewish-American composer. He was associated with interdisciplinary modernism, with affiliations ranging from the Bauhaus, Berlin agitprop theater and the kibbutz mo ...
*
Charles Wuorinen
Charles Peter Wuorinen (; June 9, 1938 – March 11, 2020) was an American composer of contemporary classical music based in New York City. He performed his works and other 20th-century music as pianist and conductor.
He composed more than ...
*
La Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American composer, musician, and performance artist recognized as one of the first American minimalist composers and a central figure in Fluxus and post-war avant-garde music. He is best kno ...
See also
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Pitch interval
References
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Further reading
* Delaere, Marc. 2016. "The Stockhausen–Goeyvaerts Correspondence and the Aesthetic Foundations of Serialism in the Early 1950s". In ''The Musical Legacy of Karlheinz Stockhausen: Looking Back and Forward'', edited by M. J. Grant and Imke Misch, 20–34. Hofheim: Wolke Verlag. .
*
Eco, Umberto
Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel ''The Name of the ...
. 2005. "Innovation & Repetition: Between Modern & Postmodern Aesthetics". ''
Daedalus'' 134, no. 4, 50 Years (Fall): 191–207. . .
*
Essl, Karlheinz. 1989
"Aspekte des Seriellen bei Stockhausen" In ''Almanach Wien Modern 89'', edited by L. Knessl, 90-97. Vienna: Konzerthaus.
*
Forte, Allen. 1964. "A Theory of Set-Complexes for Music". ''
Journal of Music Theory'' 8, no. 2 (Winter): 136–184.
* Forte, Allen. 1973. ''The Structure of Atonal Music''. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
* Forte, Allen. 1998. ''The Atonal Music of Anton Webern''. New Haven: Yale University Press.
* Fürstenberger, Barbara. 1989. ''Michel Butors literarische Träume: Untersuchungen zu Matière de rêves I bis V''. Studia Romanica 72. Heidelberg: C. Winter. .
* Gollin, Edward. 2007. "Multi-Aggregate Cycles and Multi-Aggregate Serial Techniques in the Music of Béla Bartók." ''
Music Theory Spectrum'' 29, no. 2 (Fall): 143–176. .
* Gredinger, Paul. 1955. "Das Serielle". ''
Die Reihe'' 1 ("Elektronische Musik"): 34–41. English as "Serial Technique", translated by Alexander Goehr. ''Die Reihe'' 1 ("Electronic Music"), (English edition 1958): 38–44.
* Knee, Robin. 1985. "Michel Butor's ''Passage de Milan'': The Numbers Game". ''
Review of Contemporary Fiction'' 5, no. 3:146–149.
*
Kohl, Jerome. 2017. ''Karlheinz Stockhausen: Zeitmaße''. Landmarks in Music Since 1950, edited by Wyndham Thomas. Abingdon, Oxon; London; New York: Routledge. .
*
Krenek, Ernst. 1953. "Is the Twelve-Tone Technique on the Decline?" ''
The Musical Quarterly'' 39, no 4 (October): 513–527.
*
Lerdahl, Fred, and
Ray Jackendoff. 1983. ''A Generative Theory of Tonal Music''. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
*
Meyer, Leonard B. 1967. ''Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture''. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. (Second edition 1994.)
* Miller, Elinor S. 1983. "Critical Commentary II: Butor's ''Quadruple fond'' as Serial Music". ''Romance Notes'' 24, no. 2 (Winter): 196–204.
* Misch, Imke. 2016. "Karlheinz Stockhausen: The Challenge of Legacy: An Introduction". In ''The Musical Legacy of Karlheinz Stockhausen: Looking Back and Forward'', edited by M. J. Grant and Imke Misch, 11–19. Hofheim: Wolke Verlag. .
*
Perle, George. 1962. ''Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern''. Berkeley: University of California Press.
*
Rahn, John. 1980. ''Basic Atonal Theory''. New York: Schirmer Books.
*
Ross, Alex. 2007. ''
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century''. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, .
* Roudiez, Leon S. 1984. "Un texte perturbe: ''Matière de rêves'' de Michel Butor". ''Romanic Review'' 75, no. 2:242–255.
* Savage, Roger W. H. 1989. ''Structure and Sorcery: The Aesthetetics of Post-War Serial Composition and Indeterminancy''. Outstanding Dissertations in Music from British Universities. New York: Garland Publications. .
* Schwartz, Steve. 2001.
Richard Yardumian: Orchestral Works. Classical Net.
*
Scruton, Roger
Sir Roger Vernon Scruton (; 27 February 194412 January 2020) was an English philosopher and writer who specialised in aesthetics and political philosophy, particularly in the furtherance of traditionalist conservative views.
Editor from 1982 t ...
. 1997. ''Aesthetics of Music''. Oxford: Clarendon Press. . Quoted in Arved Ashbey, ''The Pleasure of Modernist Music'' (University of Rochester Press, 2004) p. 122. .
*
Smith Brindle, Reginald. 1966. ''Serial Composition''. London, New York: Oxford University Press.
* Spencer, Michael Clifford. 1974. ''Michel Butor''. Twayne's World Author Series TWS275. New York: Twayne Publishers. .
* Straus, Joseph N. 1999.
The Myth of Serial 'Tyranny' in the 1950s and 1960s (Subscription access). ''
The Musical Quarterly'' 83:301–343.
* Wangermée, Robert. 1995. ''André Souris et le complexe d'Orphée: entre surréalisme et musique sérielle''. Collection Musique, Musicologie. Liège: P. Mardaga. .
* White, Eric Walter, and Jeremy Noble. 1984. "Stravinsky". In ''The New Grove Modern Masters''. London: Macmillan.
External links
Serial and twelve-note works by American composers(26 July 2012).
{{Authority control
20th-century classical music
Mathematics of music