Gourt > Arts > Music > Composition > Composers > Contemporary > Integral Serialism
Serialism is a technique for composing music so that each tone of a row sounds before any tone repeats. The composer is free to declare what tones are in the row. For example, Arnold Schoenberg often defined his row to be some melodic arrangement of all 12 pitches C, C#, D, ... of the chromatic scale. Other composers, extended the idea of tone row to include serial elements of dynamics: very loud, loud, medium loud, soft, very soft. Serialism in dynamics might mean that a loud series of tones would not sound again until every other dynamic, including a series of very soft tones, had sounded. Composers have sometimes extended serialism to the other possibilities in music, such as instrumentation and rhythm; the extremes for writing music have been called multiple serialism, integral serialism, and total serialism. Since serialism usually treats every note of an instrument as having equal importance, pleasant chords among instruments are unlikely, and people often hear serial music as being dissonant, harsh, or unmelodic – unless they hear a piece of serial music many times and become accustomed to it.
It is important to note that many major music theorists reject serialism on the basis that the compositional strategies employed are often incompatible with the way information is extracted by the human mind from a piece of music. Notably, Fred Lerdahl, Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University, outlines this subject further in his essay, Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems.
Important serial composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, and Jean Barraqué, went through extended periods of time in which they disciplined themselves always to use some variety of serialism in writing their music. Other composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, Arvo Pärt, Alfred Schnittke, Dmitri Shostakovich, and even jazz composers used serialism only for particular compositions or only for some sections of pieces.
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Meta Description: [ Max Nyffeler talks to Irvine Arditti. ]
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Meta Description: [ Acadia University Music 4133 X2 Structural Analysis 2 ]
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Meta Description: [ L'Ircam (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) est une institution dédiée à la recherche et la création musicale contemporaine, associée au Centre Pompidou,Paris, France. IRCAM (Institute for music/acoustic research and coordination) is dedicated to research and contempo... ]
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Twelve-Tone Rhythmic Structure and its Application to Form - Dissertation exploring how Babbitt's time-point system advanced serialism and the classic twelve-tone system.
| , where he discovered Messiaen's generalised serialism. During this period, he explored various musical genres, from the ... | |
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