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In music, serialism is a method of
composition Composition or Compositions may refer to: Arts and literature *Composition (dance), practice and teaching of choreography * Composition (language), in literature and rhetoric, producing a work in spoken tradition and written discourse, to include ...
using series of pitches, rhythms, dynamics, timbres or other musical elements. Serialism began primarily with
Arnold Schoenberg Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian and American composer, music theorist, teacher and writer. He was among the first Modernism (music), modernists who transformed the practice of harmony in 20th-centu ...
's
twelve-tone technique The twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and (in British usage) twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition. The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale ...
, 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 The chromatic scale (or twelve-tone scale) is a set of twelve pitches (more completely, pitch classes) used in tonal music, with notes separated by the interval of a semitone. Chromatic instruments, such as the piano, are made to produce the ...
, forming a row or series and providing a unifying basis for a composition's
melody A melody (), also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones that the listener perceives as a single entity. In its most literal sense, a melody is a combination of Pitch (music), pitch and rhythm, while more figurativel ...
,
harmony In music, harmony is the concept of combining different sounds in order to create new, distinct musical ideas. Theories of harmony seek to describe or explain the effects created by distinct pitches or tones coinciding with one another; harm ...
, 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 In music, timbre (), also known as tone color or tone quality (from psychoacoustics), is the perceived sound of a musical note, sound or tone. Timbre distinguishes sounds according to their source, such as choir voices and musical instrument ...
. The idea of serialism is also applied in various ways in the
visual arts The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics (art), ceramics, photography, video, image, filmmaking, design, crafts, and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual a ...
,
design A design is the concept or proposal for an object, process, or system. The word ''design'' refers to something that is or has been intentionally created by a thinking agent, and is sometimes used to refer to the inherent nature of something ...
, and
architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and construction, constructi ...
, 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 Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian and American composer, music theorist, teacher and writer. He was among the first Modernism (music), modernists who transformed the practice of harmony in 20th-centu ...
,
Anton Webern Anton Webern (; 3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945) was an Austrian composer, conductor, and musicologist. His music was among the most radical of its milieu in its lyric poetry, lyrical, poetic concision and use of then novel atonality, aton ...
,
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 Karlheinz Stockhausen (; 22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groun ...
,
Pierre Boulez Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez (; 26 March 19255 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 contemporary classical music. Born in Montb ...
, Luigi Nono, Milton Babbitt,
Elisabeth Lutyens Agnes Elisabeth Lutyens, CBE (9 July 190614 April 1983) was an English composer. Early life and education Elisabeth Lutyens was born in London on 9 July 1906. She was one of the five children of Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton (1874–1964), a me ...
,
Henri Pousseur Henri Léon Marie-Thérèse Pousseur (; 23 June 1929 – 6 March 2009) was a Belgian classical composer, teacher, and music theorist. Biography Pousseur was born in Malmedy and studied at the Academies of Music in Liège and in Brussels from 19 ...
,
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 also performed as a pianist and conductor. Wuorinen composed more than 270 works: orchestral music, c ...
and Jean Barraqué used serial techniques of one sort or another in most of their music. Other composers such as
Tadeusz Baird Tadeusz Baird (26 July 19282 September 1981) was a Polish composer. Biography Baird was born in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, in Poland. His father Edward was Polish, while his mother Maria (née Popov) was Russian. In 1944 at the age of 16 he was deport ...
,
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 Hunga ...
,
Luciano Berio Luciano Berio (24 October 1925 – 27 May 2003) was an Italian composer noted for his experimental music, experimental work (in particular his 1968 composition ''Sinfonia (Berio), Sinfonia'' and his series of virtuosic solo pieces titled ''Seque ...
, Bruno Maderna, Franco Donatoni,
Benjamin Britten Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten of Aldeburgh (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976) was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British music, with a range of works including opera, o ...
,
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 Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one ...
,
Aaron Copland Aaron Copland (, ; November 14, 1900December 2, 1990) was an American composer, critic, writer, teacher, pianist, and conductor of his own and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as the "Dean of American Compos ...
, Ernst Krenek,
György Ligeti György Sándor Ligeti (; ; 28 May 1923 – 12 June 2006) was a Hungarian-Austrian composer of contemporary classical music. He has been described as "one of the most important avant-garde music, avant-garde composers in the latter half of the ...
,
Olivier Messiaen Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithology, ornithologist. One of the major composers of the 20th-century classical music, 20th century, he was also an ou ...
,
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 p ...
,
Walter Piston Walter Hamor Piston, Jr. (January 20, 1894 – November 12, 1976), was an American composer of classical music, music theorist, and professor of music at Harvard University. Life Piston was born in Rockland, Maine at 15 Ocean Street to Walter ...
,
Ned Rorem Ned Miller Rorem (October 23, 1923 – November 18, 2022) was an American composer of contemporary classical music and a writer. Best known for his art songs, which number over 500, Rorem was considered the leading American of his time writing i ...
,
Alfred Schnittke Alfred Garrievich Schnittke (24 November 1934 – 3 August 1998) was a Russian composer. Among the most performed and recorded composers of late 20th-century classical music, he is described by musicologist Ivan Moody (composer), Ivan Moody as a ...
, 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 First Symphony in 1926 and thereafter was regarded as a major composer. Shostak ...
, and
Igor Stravinsky Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ( – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer and conductor with French citizenship (from 1934) and American citizenship (from 1945). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential 20th-century c ...
used serialism only in some of their compositions or only in some sections of pieces, as did some
jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its roots are in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, h ...
composers, such as
Bill Evans William John Evans (August 16, 1929 – September 15, 1980) was an American Jazz piano, jazz pianist and composer who worked primarily as the leader of his trio. His use of impressionist harmony, block chords, innovative chord voicings, a ...
,
Yusef Lateef Yusef Abdul Lateef (born William Emanuel Huddleston; October 9, 1920 – December 23, 2013) was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist, composer, and prominent figure among the Ahmadiyya Community in the United States. Although Lateef's main i ...
, Bill Smith, and even rock musicians like
Frank Zappa Frank Vincent Zappa (December 21, 1940 – December 4, 1993) was an American guitarist, composer, and bandleader. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa composed Rock music, rock, Pop music, pop, jazz, jazz fusion, orchestra ...
.


Basic definitions

Serialism is a method, "highly specialized technique", or "way" of
composition Composition or Compositions may refer to: Arts and literature *Composition (dance), practice and teaching of choreography * Composition (language), in literature and rhetoric, producing a work in spoken tradition and written discourse, to include ...
. It may also be considered "a philosophy of life (''
Weltanschauung A worldview (also world-view) or is said to be the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the whole of the individual's or society's knowledge, culture, and point of view. However, when two parties view the s ...
''), 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 René Leibowitz (; ; 17 February 1913 – 29 August 1972) was a Polish and French composer, conductor, music theorist and teacher. He was historically significant in promoting the music of the Second Viennese School in Paris after the Second Wo ...
in 1947, and immediately afterward by
Humphrey Searle Humphrey Searle (26 August 1915 – 12 May 1982) was an English composer and writer on music. His music combines aspects of late Romanticism and modernist serialism, particularly reminiscent of his primary influences, Franz Liszt, Arnold Sch ...
in English, as an alternative translation of the German (
twelve-tone technique The twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and (in British usage) twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition. The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale ...
) or (row music); it was independently introduced by Stockhausen and Herbert Eimert 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 Set, The Set, SET or SETS may refer to: Science, technology, and mathematics Mathematics *Set (mathematics), a collection of elements *Category of sets, the category whose objects and morphisms are sets and total functions, respectively Electro ...
—or row—of pitches or
pitch class In music, a pitch class (p.c. or pc) is a set of all pitches that are a whole number of octaves apart; for example, the pitch class C consists of the Cs in all octaves. "The pitch class C stands for all possible Cs, in whatever octave positio ...
es) 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, 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 (Crossplay) is a composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen written for oboe, bass clarinet, piano and four percussionists in 1951 (it was later revised for just three percussionists, along with other changes). It is assigned the number 1/7 in the c ...
'' 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 Henri Léon Marie-Thérèse Pousseur (; 23 June 1929 – 6 March 2009) was a Belgian classical composer, teacher, and music theorist. Biography Pousseur was born in Malmedy and studied at the Academies of Music in Liège and in Brussels from 19 ...
, 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'', 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 anthem A national anthem is a patriotic musical composition symbolizing and evoking eulogies of the history and traditions of a country or nation. The majority of national anthems are marches or hymns in style. American, Central Asian, and European ...
s 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'', 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 Tonality is the arrangement of pitch (music), pitches and / or chord (music), chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived ''relations'', ''stabilities'', ''attractions'', and ''directionality''. In this hierarchy, the single pitch or ...
". 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 ''A Faust Symphony in three character pictures'' (), List of compositions by Franz Liszt (S.1 - S.350), S.108, or simply the "''Faust Symphony''", is a choral symphony written by Hungarians, Hungarian composer Franz Liszt inspired by Johann Wolfga ...
'' 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 favor of calculated measure and proportion. In the 1930s, serial composers such as Schoenberg, Krenek, Wolpe, and Eisler left Europe for the U.S. to escape World War II. This sparked a change in American music as well as the works of the European composers now residing in the U.S.


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 Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one ...
'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 and
George Perle George Perle (6 May 1915 – 23 January 2009) was an American composer and music theory, music theorist. As a composer, his music was largely atonality, atonal, using methods similar to the twelve-tone technique of the Second Viennese School. Th ...
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 Rhythm (from Greek , ''rhythmos'', "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a " movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular r ...
, dynamics, and other elements of music was partly fostered by the work of Olivier Messiaen and his analysis students, including
Karel Goeyvaerts Karel August Goeyvaerts (8 June 1923 – 3 February 1993) was a Belgian composer. Life Goeyvaerts was born in Antwerp, where he studied at the Royal Flemish Music Conservatory; he later studied composition in Paris with Darius Milhaud and analysi ...
and Boulez, in postwar
Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...
. 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 Pointillism (, ) is a technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of color are applied in patterns to form an image. Georges Seurat and Paul Signac developed the technique in 1886, branching from Impressionism. The term "Pointillism" ...
" (German "pointillistische", French "pointilliste"), the term associated with the densely packed dots in
Seurat Georges Pierre Seurat ( , ; ; 2 December 1859 – 29 March 1891) was a French post-Impressionist artist. He devised the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism and pointillism and used conté crayon for drawings on paper with a rough ...
'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 De Stijl (, ; 'The Style') was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 by a group of artists and architects based in Leiden (Theo van Doesburg, Jacobus Oud, J.J.P. Oud), Voorburg (Vilmos Huszár, Jan Wils) and Laren, North Holland, Laren (Piet Mo ...
and
Bauhaus The Staatliches Bauhaus (), commonly known as the , was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined Decorative arts, crafts and the fine arts.Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th edn., ...
movements in design and architecture some writers called " serial art", specifically the paintings of
Piet Mondrian Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (; 7 March 1872 – 1 February 1944), known after 1911 as Piet Mondrian (, , ), was a Dutch Painting, painter and Theory of art, art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He w ...
,
Theo van Doesburg Theo van Doesburg (; born Christian Emil Marie Küpper; 30 August 1883 – 7 March 1931) was a Dutch painter, writer, poet and architect. He is best known as the founder and leader of De Stijl. He married three times. Personal life Theo van Do ...
, 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 In music theory, retrograde inversion is a musical term that literally means "backwards and upside down": "The inverse of the series is sounded in reverse order." Retrograde reverses the order of the motif's pitches: what was the first pitch ...
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 The sonata form (also sonata-allegro form or first movement form) is a musical form, musical structure generally consisting of three main sections: an exposition, a development, and a recapitulation. It has been used widely since the middle of t ...
and
tonality Tonality is the arrangement of pitch (music), pitches and / or chord (music), chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived ''relations'', ''stabilities'', ''attractions'', and ''directionality''. In this hierarchy, the single pitch or ...
, 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, actuary and businessman. Ives was among the earliest renowned American composers to achieve recognition on a global scale. His music was largely ignored d ...
'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's ''New Musical Resources'' (1930) and the work of
Joseph Schillinger Joseph Moiseyevich Schillinger (; (other sources: ) – 23 March 1943) was a composer, music theorist, and music composition, composition teacher who originated the Schillinger System of Musical Composition. He was born in Kharkiv, Kharkov, in the ...
.


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 ''Le Marteau sans maître'' (; The Hammer without a Master) is a chamber cantata by French composer Pierre Boulez. The work, which received its premiere in 1955, sets surrealist poetry by René Char for contralto and six instrumentalists. It is ...
''. 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—taking into account the dynamic interaction of the different component phenomena, which creates "waves" that interact in a sort of
frequency modulation Frequency modulation (FM) is a signal modulation technique used in electronic communication, originally for transmitting messages with a radio wave. In frequency modulation a carrier wave is varied in its instantaneous frequency in proporti ...
—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 Alfred Whitford (Fred) Lerdahl (born March 10, 1943) is an American music theorist and composer. Best known for his work on musical grammar, Music cognition, cognition, Rhythm, rhythmic theory, and pitch space, he and the linguist Ray Jackendoff d ...
, for example, in his essay " Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems", 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 The harmonic series (also overtone series) is the sequence of harmonics, musical tones, or pure tones whose frequency is an integer multiple of a ''fundamental frequency''. Pitched musical instruments are often based on an acoustic resonator s ...
, which is also used as the model for the rhythms), and Pousseur's '' Scambi'' (where the permuted sounds are made exclusively from filtered
white noise In signal processing, white noise is a random signal having equal intensity at different frequencies, giving it a constant power spectral density. The term is used with this or similar meanings in many scientific and technical disciplines, i ...
). 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 Set theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies Set (mathematics), sets, which can be informally described as collections of objects. Although objects of any kind can be collected into a set, set theory – as a branch of mathema ...
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 In music, the tonic is the first scale degree () of the diatonic scale (the first note of a scale) and the tonal center or final resolution tone that is commonly used in the final cadence in tonal (musical key-based) classical music, popula ...
; 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 (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. (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 In music theory, retrograde inversion is a musical term that literally means "backwards and upside down": "The inverse of the series is sounded in reverse order." Retrograde reverses the order of the motif's pitches: what was the first pitch ...
—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 (Abrahamsen), Let me tell you'' (2013), a song cycle for soprano and orchestra, was ranked by music critics at ''The Guard ...
* Gilbert Amy * Louis Andriessen * Denis ApIvor * Hans Erich Apostel * Kees van Baaren * Milton Babbitt *
Tadeusz Baird Tadeusz Baird (26 July 19282 September 1981) was a Polish composer. Biography Baird was born in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, in Poland. His father Edward was Polish, while his mother Maria (née Popov) was Russian. In 1944 at the age of 16 he was deport ...
* Osvaldas Balakauskas * Don Banks * Jean Barraqué * Jürg Baur *
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 Erik Valdemar Bergman (24 November 1911 – 24 April 2006) was a composer of european classical music, classical music from Finland. Bergman's style ranged widely, from Romanticism in his early works (many of which he later prohibited from bein ...
*
Luciano Berio Luciano Berio (24 October 1925 – 27 May 2003) was an Italian composer noted for his experimental music, experimental work (in particular his 1968 composition ''Sinfonia (Berio), Sinfonia'' and his series of virtuosic solo pieces titled ''Seque ...
* Karl-Birger Blomdahl * Konrad Boehmer * Rob du Bois *
André Boucourechliev André Boucourechliev (28 July 1925 – 13 November 1997) was a French composer of Bulgarian origin. Born in Sofia, Boucourechliev studied piano at the Conservatory there. Subsequently, he studied in Paris at the École Normale de Musique de Pari ...
*
Pierre Boulez Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez (; 26 March 19255 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 contemporary classical music. Born in Montb ...
* Martin Boykan * Ole Buck * Jacques Calonne * Niccolò Castiglioni * Aldo Clementi * Salvador Contreras *
Aaron Copland Aaron Copland (, ; November 14, 1900December 2, 1990) was an American composer, critic, writer, teacher, pianist, and conductor of his own and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as the "Dean of American Compos ...
* Luigi Dallapiccola * Franco Donatoni *
Hanns Eisler Hanns Eisler (6 July 1898 – 6 September 1962) was a German-Austrian composer. He is best known for composing the national anthem of East Germany, for his long artistic association with Bertolt Brecht, and for the scores he wrote for films. The ...
* Manuel Enríquez * 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 * Irving Fine *
Wolfgang Fortner Wolfgang Fortner (12 October 1907 – 5 September 1987) was a German composer, academic composition teacher and conductor. Life and career Fortner was born in Leipzig. From his parents, who were both singers, Fortner very early on had intense ...
*
Roberto Gerhard Robert Gerhard i Ottenwaelder (; 25 September 1896 – 5 January 1970) was a Spanish and British composer, musical scholar, and writer, generally known outside his native region of Catalonia as Roberto Gerhard.Malcolm MacDonald. 'Gerhard, Roberto' ...
* Frans Geysen * Michael Gielen *
Alberto Ginastera Alberto Evaristo Ginastera (; April 11, 1916June 25, 1983) was an Argentine composer of classical music. He is considered to be one of the most important 20th-century classical music, 20th-century classical composers of the Americas. Biography G ...
* Lucien Goethals *
Karel Goeyvaerts Karel August Goeyvaerts (8 June 1923 – 3 February 1993) was a Belgian composer. Life Goeyvaerts was born in Antwerp, where he studied at the Royal Flemish Music Conservatory; he later studied composition in Paris with Darius Milhaud and analysi ...
*
Jerry Goldsmith Jerrald King Goldsmith (February 10, 1929July 21, 2004) was an American composer, conductor and orchestrator with a career in film and television scoring that spanned nearly 50 years and over 200 productions, between 1954 and 2003. He was consid ...
*
Henryk Górecki Henryk Mikołaj Górecki ( , ; 6 December 1933 – 12 November 2010) was a Polish composer of contemporary classical music. According to critic Alex Ross, no recent classical composer has had as much commercial success as Górecki. He became a l ...
* Glenn Gould * Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen * César Guerra-Peixe *
Lou Harrison Lou Silver Harrison (May 14, 1917 – February 2, 2003) was an American composer, music critic, music theorist, painter, and creator of unique musical instruments. Harrison initially wrote in a dissonant, ultramodernist style similar to his for ...
* Jonathan Harvey *
Josef Matthias Hauer Josef Matthias Hauer (March 19, 1883 – September 22, 1959) was an Austrian composer and music theorist. He is best known for developing, independent of and a year or two before Arnold Schoenberg Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (13 Septembe ...
* Paavo Heininen * Hermann Heiss *
Hans Werner Henze Hans Werner Henze (1 July 1926 – 27 October 2012) was a German composer. His large List of compositions by Hans Werner Henze, oeuvre is extremely varied in style, having been influenced by serialism, atonality, Igor Stravinsky, Stravinsky, Mu ...
* York Höller * Heinz Holliger * Bill Hopkins * Klaus Huber *
Karel Husa Karel Husa (August 7, 1921 – December 14, 2016) was a Czech-born classical composer and conductor, winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Music and 1993 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. In 1954, he emigrated to ...
*
Hanns Jelinek Hanns Jelinek (5 December 1901 – 27 January 1969) was an Austrian composer of Czech descent who is also known under the pseudonyms Hanns Elin, H. J. Hirsch, Jakob Fidelbogen. Biography Jelinek was born and died in Vienna. His father was a ma ...
* Ben Johnston * Nikolai Karetnikov * Rudolf Kelterborn * Gottfried Michael Koenig * Józef Koffler * Ernst Krenek * Meyer Kupferman *
René Leibowitz René Leibowitz (; ; 17 February 1913 – 29 August 1972) was a Polish and French composer, conductor, music theorist and teacher. He was historically significant in promoting the music of the Second Viennese School in Paris after the Second Wo ...
* Ingvar Lidholm *
Witold Lutosławski Witold Roman Lutosławski (; 25 January 1913 – 7 February 1994) was a Polish composer and conductor. Among the major composers of 20th-century classical music, he is "generally regarded as the most significant Polish composer since Szymanow ...
*
Elisabeth Lutyens Agnes Elisabeth Lutyens, CBE (9 July 190614 April 1983) was an English composer. Early life and education Elisabeth Lutyens was born in London on 9 July 1906. She was one of the five children of Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton (1874–1964), a me ...
* John McGuire * Bruno Maderna * Ursula Mamlok * Philippe Manoury *
Donald Martino Donald James Martino (May 16, 1931 – December 8, 2005) was a Pulitzer Prize winning American composer. Biography Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, Martino attended Plainfield High School. He began as a clarinetist, playing jazz for fun and ...
* Paul Méfano * Jacques-Louis Monod * Robert Morris * Luigi Nono * Per Nørgård *
Krzysztof Penderecki Krzysztof Eugeniusz Penderecki (; 23 November 1933 – 29 March 2020) was a Polish composer and conductor. His best-known works include '' Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima'', Symphony No. 3, his '' St Luke Passion'', '' Polish Requiem'', '' ...
* Goffredo Petrassi * Michel Philippot *
Walter Piston Walter Hamor Piston, Jr. (January 20, 1894 – November 12, 1976), was an American composer of classical music, music theorist, and professor of music at Harvard University. Life Piston was born in Rockland, Maine at 15 Ocean Street to Walter ...
*
Henri Pousseur Henri Léon Marie-Thérèse Pousseur (; 23 June 1929 – 6 March 2009) was a Belgian classical composer, teacher, and music theorist. Biography Pousseur was born in Malmedy and studied at the Academies of Music in Liège and in Brussels from 19 ...
* Einojuhani Rautavaara * Roger Reynolds *
Terry Riley Terrence Mitchell Riley (born June 24, 1935) is an American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist music, minimalist school of composition. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his work became notab ...
*
George Rochberg George Rochberg (July 5, 1918May 29, 2005) was an American composer of contemporary classical music. Long a serialism, serial composer, Rochberg abandoned the technique after his teenage son died in 1964, saying it had proved inadequate to expres ...
* Leonard Rosenman * Cláudio Santoro * Peter Schat * Leon Schidlowsky *
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 and American composer, music theorist, teacher and writer. He was among the first Modernism (music), modernists who transformed the practice of harmony in 20th-centu ...
, considered the founder of serialism *
Humphrey Searle Humphrey Searle (26 August 1915 – 12 May 1982) was an English composer and writer on music. His music combines aspects of late Romanticism and modernist serialism, particularly reminiscent of his primary influences, Franz Liszt, Arnold Sch ...
* Ruth Crawford Seeger *
Mátyás Seiber Mátyás György Seiber (, sometimes given as Matthis Seyber; 4 May 1905 – 24 September 1960) was a Hungarian-born British composer who lived and worked in the United Kingdom from 1935 onwards. His work linked many diverse musical influences, ...
* Roger Sessions * Nikos Skalkottas * Roger Smalley * Ann Southam * Leopold Spinner *
Karlheinz Stockhausen Karlheinz Stockhausen (; 22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groun ...
*
Igor Stravinsky Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ( – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer and conductor with French citizenship (from 1934) and American citizenship (from 1945). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential 20th-century c ...
* Robert Suderburg * Richard Swift * Louise Talma * Camillo Togni * Gilles Tremblay * Fartein Valen *
Wladimir Vogel Wladimir Rudolfowitsch Vogel (17 February/29 February 1896 – 19 June 1984) was a Swiss (people), Swiss composer of Germans, German and Russians, Russian descent. Life Born in Moscow, Vogel first studied composition in Moscow with Alexander Scri ...
*
Anton Webern Anton Webern (; 3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945) was an Austrian composer, conductor, and musicologist. His music was among the most radical of its milieu in its lyric poetry, lyrical, poetic concision and use of then novel atonality, aton ...
* Hugo Weisgall * Peter Westergaard * Stefan Wolpe *
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 also performed as a pianist and conductor. Wuorinen composed more than 270 works: orchestral music, c ...
*
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 k ...


See also

* Pitch interval


References


Sources

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


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. 2005. "Innovation & Repetition: Between Modern & Postmodern Aesthetics". ''
Daedalus In Greek mythology, Daedalus (, ; Greek language, Greek: Δαίδαλος; Latin language, Latin: ''Daedalus''; Etruscan language, Etruscan: ''Taitale'') was a skillful architect and craftsman, seen as a symbol of wisdom, knowledge and power. H ...
'' 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 The ''Journal of Music Theory'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal specializing in music theory and analysis. It was established by David Kraehenbuehl (Yale University) in 1957. According to its website, " e ''Journal of Music Theory'' fosters co ...
'' 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 ''The Musical Quarterly'' is the oldest academic journal on music in America. Originally established in 1915 by Oscar Sonneck, the journal was edited by Sonneck until his death in 1928. Sonneck was succeeded by a number of editors, including C ...
'' 39, no 4 (October): 513–527. * Lerdahl, Fred, and
Ray Jackendoff Ray Jackendoff (born January 23, 1945) is an American linguist. He is professor of philosophy, Seth Merrin Chair in the Humanities and, with Daniel Dennett, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has always str ...
. 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 Aesthetics of Post-War Serial Composition and Indeterminacy''. Outstanding Dissertations in Music from British Universities. New York: Garland Publications. . * Schwartz, Steve. 2001.
Richard Yardumian: Orchestral Works
. Classical Net. * Scruton, Roger. 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 ''The Musical Quarterly'' is the oldest academic journal on music in America. Originally established in 1915 by Oscar Sonneck, the journal was edited by Sonneck until his death in 1928. Sonneck was succeeded by a number of editors, including C ...
'' 83:301–343. * . 1995. ''André Souris et le complexe d'Orphée: entre surréalisme et musique sérielle''. Collection Musique, Musicologie. Liège: P. Mardaga. . * and Jeremy Noble. 1984. "Stravinsky". In ''The New Grove Modern Masters''. London: Macmillan.


External links

* (26 July 2012). {{Authority control 20th-century classical music Mathematics of music