Serialism developed as a way forward from what was felt by adventurous composers to be the dead end of tonality reached by 19th-century composers, notably Richard Wagner. Wagner had stretched tonality to its limits with his music, culminating with his opera Tristan und Isolde in 1859. Later composers, such as Gustav MAHLER and Richard STRAUSS, continued in the same tradition, but others, beginning with Arnold SCHOENBERG, wanted to take music to another level of modernity.
Western classical music was traditionally based on the diatonic scale—the series of seven ascending notes spaced at prescribed intervals, with the first of these notes, called the keynote or tonic, giving its name to the “key” of the scale. The sense of development and progress in a piece of music was built-in by modulating from the “home” key to a related key, and on to other keys before ending in the original key. Notes that did not “belong” to the tonality of the piece were called chromatic—a word meaning “coloured”—in the sense that these notes gave piquancy to the sound.
Gradually, composers modulated to more and more distant keys, or composed in two or more keys simultaneously (polytonality), and chromaticism undermined the sense of key. In the modernistic atmosphere of the post-World War I era, the time was ripe for a new basis for music.
Arnold Schoenberg, a Viennese composer teaching in Berlin, began to experiment with freeing music from the scale altogether. He evolved a system based on the tone-row. This was a series of 12 tones related only to one another. The tone-row was an arrangement of all 12 notes of the chromatic scale, in which no note might appear twice.
Once fixed, the 12-note arrangement became the “series” on which a composition would be based. The series might be quoted backward, or “retrograde,” or the intervals might be inverted from down to up and vice versa, in the “inversion.” Both retrograde and inversion modifications might be applied together. Any note of the series might be transposed to a different octave, and the whole tone-row might be transposed, or parts of it played together in a tone cluster. However, the composer had to bear in mind that single tones could not be quoted out of order. As formulaic as it appeared, Schoenberg’s rules meant that the underlying tone-row, in its varying treatments, gave cohesion to the composition.
Strict serialism was in fact practiced in very few works, although once Schoenberg’s pupil Anton WEBERN had adopted the 12-tone system in 1924, he used it for the rest of his life. But other composers used the principle as a springboard for other ideas. Schoenberg himself composed in a series of nine notes (Five Piano Pieces, 1920) and 14 notes (Serenade, 1920–23) and Igor STRAVINSKY’S In Memoriam Dylan Thomas uses a tone-row of only five notes. The 12-tone row offers all the semitone intervals of the octave, but French composer Pierre BOULEZ extended this to 24 microtonal intervals in his cantata le visage nuptial for female voices and chamber orchestra (1946).
Serialism can also be extended to other elements of music, notably the rhythmic organisation of a piece. Here, time values can be arranged in a series and repeated, mirrored (retrograde), or multiplied by the same value throughout (transposed). Boulez again experimented with series of durations in Structures Ia for two pianos. The French composer Olivier MESSIAEN also used something similar that he had devised from a study of Hindu classical talas, or rhythmic patterns.
Schoenberg’s earliest works were in post-Wagnerian style, and it was not until the beginning of the 1920s that he formulated the rules of serialism and wrote his first serial music. He first used 12-tone composition in his Five Piano Pieces Op. 23, which he wrote between 1920 and 1923.
Schoenberg was to write many other works that adhered strictly to the principles of 12-tone composition. However, having established the rules of serialism, Schoenberg soon began breaking them, placing notes out of sequence or doubling parts of the lines. Many examples of this rule-breaking can be found in his later works, such as the piano concerto of 1942 and the cantata A Survivor of Warsaw (1948).
Schoenberg’s system of composition was naturally emulated by his students, the most illustrious of whom were Webern and Alban BERG. Berg is best remembered for his opera Wozzeck (1922). His second opera, Lulu (1935), which was unfinished at the time of his death, was based on a single tone-row and four variations derived mathematically from it. The intense drama of Lulu, which ends when the streetwalker heroine is murdered by Jack the Ripper, brands itself on the listener through the inventiveness of the orchestration, above all, with the blaring of the predominant brass section. But the opera is held together by Berg’s extensive and systematic manipulation of the tone-row.
Followers of Berg re-introduced tonal elements to lessen the tension generated by the extended “dissonances” resulting from strict adherence to the rules of serialism. These included the Italian Luigi Dallapiccola (1904–75). He chose his tone-rows so as to exploit their tonal implications, and looked backward to the 17th century, using musical forms of that period.
Tonal elements are even more prevalent in the music of the German composer Hans Werner HENZE, the American Wallingford Riegger (1885–1961), and the Swiss composer Frank Martin (1890–1974), who actually re-introduced major and minor triads.
Webern’s music was ascetic and stripped to the barest essentials. Many of his compositions last only a minute or two. His strict adherence to the rules of serialism means that the tone-row itself dictates the musical form of the piece. Webern also applied Schoenberg’s rules regarding repetition to the registers and instrumental timbre in which each tone was played. This repetition forced the listener to concentrate on the tone itself as well as its role in the statement of the row.
Many modern composers took Webern as a starting point for their own work, applying strict serialisation to elements such as rhythm, tempo, and instrumentation as well as to the tone-row. For example, Boulez wrote serial music for exotic and conventional instruments, introducing aleatoric (random or performer’s choice) elements in his second sonata for piano. Also, the German composer Karlheinz STOCKHAUSEN found in the mathematical complexities of electronically produced wave-forms a complement to the rules of serial music, and his works include music for synthesized sound, alone and in combination with conventional instruments.
Although serial music was controversial when first introduced, today’s audiences appear to accept it with less difficulty. The post-serial generation of composers has taken on aspects of the organisational philosophy of serialism rather than the system itself, and this aspect of serialism has had a greater influence on 20th-century music than the serial compositions themselves.
The 20th-century composers who are performed more often than many of the hard-line serialists include major figures such as Witold LUTOSLAWSKI, Harrison Birtwistle (b. 1934), and Peter Maxwell Davies (b. 1934). These were never true serial composers, but their music would have been vastly different had serial music never happened.
Jane Prendergast
SEE ALSO:
ALEATORY MUSIC; ELECTRONIC MUSIC.
Griffiths, Paul. Modern Music: A Concise History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994);
Schoffman, Nachum. From Chords to Simultaneities: Chordal Indeterminacy and the Failure of Serialism (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990).
Babbitt: All Set; My End Is My Beginning; Relata I and II; Berg: Altenberg Lieder; Lulu; Three Pieces for Orchestra; Berio: Nones; Boulez: Le marteau sans maître; Polyphonie X; Structures; Nono: Allelujah II; Schoenberg: Piano concerto; String Quartet No. 4; Variations for Orchestra; Violin Concerto; Webern: Cantatas Nos. 1 and 2; Concerto for Nine Instruments.