Editing Serialism (section)

==History of serial music==

===Before World War II===
{{see also|Second Viennese School}}
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.{{sfn|Delahoyde|n.d.}}

Twelve-tone serialism first appeared in the 1920s, with antecedents predating that decade (instances of 12-note passages occur in Liszt's ''[[Faust Symphony]]''{{sfn|Walker|1986|p={{Page needed|date=September 2014}}}} and in Bach.{{sfn|Cope|1971|p={{Page needed|date=September 2014}}}})  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.{{sfn|Whittall|2008|p=1}} In Schoenberg's own words, his goal of {{lang|fr|l'invention contrariée}} was to show constraint in composition.{{sfn|Moore|1995|page=77}} 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.{{sfn|Granade|2015}} 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.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Straus |first=Joseph N. |date=2008-07-18 |title=A Revisionist History of Twelve-Tone Serialism in American Music |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-society-for-american-music/article/abs/revisionist-history-of-twelvetone-serialism-in-american-music/DBBF1D5303FCF3452639CF2C794A51DD |journal=Journal of the Society for American Music |language=en |volume=2 |issue=3 |page=355 |doi=10.1017/S1752196308080115 |issn=1752-1971|url-access=subscription }}</ref>

===After World War II===
{{see also|Darmstadt School}}
Along with [[John Cage]]'s [[indeterminate music]] (music composed with the use of chance operations) and [[Werner Meyer-Eppler]]'s [[Aleatoric music|aleatoricism]], serialism was enormously influential in postwar music. Theorists such as [[Milton Babbitt]] 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.{{sfn|Ball|2011|pages=24–41}} 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.{{cn|date=December 2020}}

The serialization of [[rhythm]], [[dynamics (music)|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]]''.{{sfn|Sherlaw Johnson|1989|p=94}} 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).{{sfn|Whittall|2008}}{{sfn|Mead|1985}} He worked independently of the Europeans.{{cn|date=December 2020}}
[[File:Messiaen - Mode de valeurs et d'intensites series upper line -- Boulez - Structures Ia.png|thumb|right|400px|Olivier Messiaen's unordered series for pitch, duration, dynamics, and articulation from the pre-serial ''[[Quatre études de rythme#"Mode de valeurs et d'intensités"|Mode de valeurs et d'intensités]]'', upper division only—which Pierre Boulez adapted as an ordered row for his ''[[Structures I]]''.{{sfn|Whittall|2008|p=178}}]]
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 [[Theme (music)|thematicism]].{{sfn|Felder|1977|p=92}} Instead of a recurring, referential row, "each musical component is subjected to control by a series of numerical proportions".{{sfn|Morgan|1975|p=3}} 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 "[[Punctualism|punktuelle]] Musik" ("pointist" or "punctual music"), then in French "musique ponctuelle", but quickly confused with "[[Pointillism|pointillistic]]" (German "pointillistische", French "pointilliste"), the term associated with the densely packed dots in [[Seurat]]'s paintings, even though the concept was unrelated.{{sfn|Stockhausen and Frisius|1998|p=451}}

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]]",{{sfn|Bochner|1967}}{{sfn|Gerstner|1964}}{{sfn|Guderian|1985}}{{sfn|Sykora|1983}} specifically the paintings of [[Piet Mondrian]], [[Theo van Doesburg]], Bart van Leck, Georg van Tongerloo, Richard Paul Lohse, and [[Burgoyne Diller]], who had sought to "avoid repetition and symmetry on all structural levels and working with a limited number of elements".{{sfn|Bandur|2001|p=54}}

Stockhausen described the final synthesis in this manner:<blockquote>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.{{sfn|Cott|1973|p=101}}</blockquote>

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.{{sfn|Shatzkin|1977}} Because many of the basic techniques of serial composition have analogs in traditional counterpoint, uses of [[Melodic inversion|inversion]], [[Retrograde (music)|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.{{cn|date=December 2020}}

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.{{sfn|Jalowetz|1944|p=387}}{{sfn|Keller|1955|loc=passim}} In particular, the orchestral outburst that introduces the [[Sonata form#Development|development section]] halfway through the last movement of [[Symphony No. 40 (Mozart)|Mozart's Symphony No. 40]] is a tone row that Mozart punctuates in a very modern and violent way that [[Michael Steinberg (music critic)|Michael Steinberg]] called "rude octaves and frozen silences".{{sfn|Steinberg|1998|p=400}}

[[Ruth Crawford Seeger]] extended serial control to parameters other than pitch and to formal planning as early as 1930–33{{sfn|Tick|2001}} in a fashion that goes beyond Webern but was less thoroughgoing than the later practices of Babbitt and European postwar composers.{{cn|date=December 2020}} [[Charles Ives]]'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.{{sfn|Schoffman|1981}} 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]].{{cn|date=December 2020}}