Serialism

Serialism is a compositional method built on series of pitches, rhythms, dynamics, timbres, or other musical elements. Its origins are mainly tied to Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though some of his peers were also exploring serialism as a form of post-tonal thought. The twelve-tone technique organizes the twelve notes of the chromatic scale into a row or series, which serves as a unifying foundation for a piece's melody, harmony, structural progressions, and variations. Other forms of serialism work with sets—collections of objects—but don't necessarily require a fixed order, and they extend the technique to other musical dimensions, often called parameters, like duration, dynamics, and timbre. The concept of serialism also appears in visual arts, design, and architecture, and has been adapted in literature.

Integral serialism, or total serialism, applies series to aspects such as duration, dynamics, and register in addition to pitch. In Europe, especially after World War II, terms like general serialism and multiple serialism are used to distinguish this later serial music from twelve-tone music and its American offshoots. Composers like Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, Milton Babbitt, Elisabeth Lutyens, Henri Pousseur, Charles Wuorinen, and Jean Barraqué used serial techniques in most of their work. Others—including Tadeusz Baird, Béla Bartók, Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna, Franco Donatoni, Benjamin Britten, John Cage, Aaron Copland, Ernst Krenek, György Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Arvo Pärt, Walter Piston, Ned Rorem, Alfred Schnittke, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Igor Stravinsky—used serialism only in some compositions or sections. Some jazz composers, such as Bill Evans, Yusef Lateef, and Bill Smith, and even rock musicians like Frank Zappa, also employed it.

Serialism is a method, a highly specialized technique, or a way of composition. It can also be seen as a philosophy of life, a way of relating the human mind to the world and creating completeness when dealing with a subject. Serialism is not itself a system of composition or a style, and pitch serialism isn't necessarily incompatible with tonality, though it's most often used for atonal music. The term "serial music" is problematic because its meaning varies across languages; shortly after it was coined in French, it underwent essential changes when transmitted to German. The term was first used in connection with music in French by René Leibowitz in 1947, and soon after in English by Humphrey Searle as an alternative translation of the German Zwölftontechnik (twelve-tone technique) or Reihenmusik (row music). Independently, Stockhausen and Herbert Eimert introduced it into German in 1955 as serielle Musik, with a different meaning, but also translated as "serial music".

The first type of serialism is defined as a structural principle where a recurring series of ordered elements—normally a set or row of pitches or pitch classes—is used in order or manipulated in specific ways to give a piece unity. "Serial" is often broadly used for all music written in what Schoenberg called "The Method of Composing with Twelve Notes related only to one another," or dodecaphony, and methods that evolved from his. Sometimes it's used more specifically for music where at least one element other than pitch is treated as a row or series, often called post-Webernian serialism. Other terms for this 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 doesn't itself define a composition's structure, which requires a comprehensive strategy. The choice of strategy often depends on the relationships within a row class, and rows may be constructed to produce the relationships needed for desired strategies. The basic set may have additional restrictions, such as requiring each interval to be used only once.

Rules of analysis from twelve-tone theory don't apply to the second type of serialism—in particular, the ideas that the series is an intervallic sequence and that the rules are consistent. For instance, Stockhausen's early serial works like Kreuzspiel and Formel advance in unit sections where a preordained set of pitches is repeatedly reconfigured, with the composer's model for the distributive serial process corresponding to a development of Josef Matthias Hauer's Zwölftonspiel. Goeyvaerts's Nummer 4 provides a classic illustration of the distributive function of seriality: four 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 coincidence to the greatest possible dispersion. This demonstrates the logical principle of seriality that 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 (1954–55) and the Quintette (à la mémoire d’Anton Webern, 1955), and from around the time of Impromptu (1955) encountered whole new dimensions of application and new functions.