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Serialism 1 Serialism Serialism 1 Serialism In music, serialism is a method or technique of composition (Griffiths 2001, 116) that uses a series of values to manipulate different musical elements. Serialism began primarily Six-element row of rhythmic values used in Variazioni canoniche by Luigi Nono with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone (Whittall 2008, 165) technique, though his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as one example of post-tonal thinking (Whittall 2008, 1). Twelve-tone technique orders the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, forming a row or series and providing a unifying basis for a composition's melody, harmony, 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 (Bandur 2001, 5, 12, 74; Gerstner 1964, passim). The musical use of the word "series" should not be confused with the mathematical term "series." Integral serialism or total serialism is the use of series for aspects such as duration, dynamics, and register as well as pitch (Whittall 2008, 273). 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 (Grant 2001, 5–6). Composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, Milton Babbitt and Jean Barraqué, used serial techniques of one sort or another in most of their music. Other composers such as Béla Bartók, Luciano Berio, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, Olivier Messiaen, Arvo Pärt, Walter Piston, Alfred Schnittke, Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, and even some jazz composers such as Yusef Lateef and Bill Evans, used serialism only for some of their compositions or only for some sections of pieces. Richard Yardumian used a unique variation of the 12-tone scale "different from Schoenberg's" in which "series were derived by alternating major and minor thirds" (Schwartz 2001). Basic definitions Serialism is a method (Griffiths 2001, 116), "highly specialized technique" (Wörner 1973, 196), or "way" (Whittall 2008, 1) 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" (Bandur 2001, 5). However, serialism is not by itself a system of composition, nor is it a style. Neither is pitch serialism necessarily incompatible with tonality, though it is most often used as a means of composing atonal music (Griffiths 2001, 116). "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 (Frisius 1998, 1327). The use of the word "serial" in connection with music was first introduced in French by René Leibowitz (1947), and immediately afterward by Humphrey Searle in English, as an alternative translation of the German Zwölftontechnik Twelve-tone technique or Reihenmusik (row music); it was independently introduced by Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen into German in 1954 as serielle Musik, with a different meaning, translated into English also as "serial music". Serialism 2 Twelve-tone serialism Serialism of the first type is most specifically defined as the structural principle according to which a recurring series of ordered elements (normally a set—or row—of pitches or pitch classes), which are used in order or manipulated in particular ways to give a piece unity. Serialism is often broadly applied to all music written in what Arnold Schoenberg called "The Method of Composing with Twelve Notes related only to one another" (Schoenberg 1975, 218; Anon. [n.d.]), or dodecaphony, and methods that evolved from his methods. It is sometimes used more specifically to apply only to music where at least one other element other than pitch is subjected to being treated as a row or series. In such usages post-Webernian serialism will be used to denote works that extend serial techniques to other elements of music. Other terms used to make the distinction are 12-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 it may be derived from a spontaneously invented thematic or motivic idea. The basic set may have additional restrictions, such as the requirement that it use each interval only once. Non-twelve-tone serialism 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" (Maconie 2005, 119). Stockhausen, for example, in early serial compositions such as Kreuzspiel and Formel, "advances 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" (Maconie 2005, 56), and Goeyvaerts, in such a work as 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. (Sabbe 1977, 114) For Henri Pousseur, after an initial period working with twelve-tone technique in works like Sept Versets (1950) and Trois Chants sacrés (1951), serialism evolved away from this bond in Symphonies pour quinze Solistes [1954–55] and in the Quintette [à la mémoire d’Anton Webern, 1955], and from around the time of Impromptu [1955] encounters 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. (Sabbe 1977, 264) Serialism 3 History of serial music Serialism first appeared in the 1920s, with antecedents predating that year. 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 (Whittall 2008, 1). The serialization of rhythm, dynamics, and other elements of music developed after the Second World War by arguing that the twelve-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers of the Second Viennese School had serialized pitch, and was partly fostered by the work of Olivier Messiaen and his analysis students, including Karel Goeyvaerts and Boulez, in post-war Paris. Olivier Messiaen's unordered series for pitch, duration, dynamics, and articulation from the pre-serial Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, upper division only—which Pierre Boulez adapted as an ordered row for his Structures I (Whittall 2008, 178) Twelve-tone music In the early 20th century composers began to struggle against the ordered system of chords and intervals known as "functional tonality", in an effort to find new forms of expression and underlying structural organizing principles (Delahoyd [n.d.] [1]). Serialism and high modernism Serialism, along with John Cage's indeterminate music (music composed with the use of chance operations), and Werner Meyer-Eppler's aleatoricism, was enormously influential in post-war music. Theorists such as George Perle codified serial systems, and his 1962 text Serial Composition and Atonality became a standard work on the origins of serial composition in the work of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. Several of the composers associated with Darmstadt, notably Karlheinz Stockhausen, Karel Goeyvaerts, and Henri 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 (Felder 1977, 92). Instead of a recurring, referential row, "each musical component is subjected to control by a series of numerical proportions" (Morgan 1975, 3). In Europe, the style of some serial as well as 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
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