Serial music

What it means

Serial music transfers the row principle of twelve-tone technique to further parameters. Not only pitches but also durations, volumes, articulations, and tone colours are ordered by rows that run through the piece. This achieves a high degree of predetermination: the decisions are made in the design of the system, and the course results from it.

Musical use

The movement developed around 1950 in Europe, above all in the circle of the Darmstadt Summer Courses, and was a focal point of discussion in the 1950s. Olivier Messiaen's piano piece Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, written in Darmstadt in 1949, is regarded as the impulse: it assigns fixed durations, attacks, and dynamics to 36 pitches, but treats these values as a mode rather than as an ordered row. Pierre Boulez turned them into ordered series for Structures I (1952), and Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote Kreuzspiel in 1951 after encountering the piece. Independently, Milton Babbitt in the United States had already serialized rhythm in his Three Compositions for Piano (1947). The movement rested on the idea of freeing music from traditional habits and building it anew from an ordered system. Soon a contradiction showed itself: the more strongly every individual value is fixed, the less the ear perceives an order. In 1955 Iannis Xenakis wrote in the Gravesaner Blätter that linear polyphony was destroying itself through its complexity; what one hears is merely a mass of notes in various registers. In response, composers developed procedures that work with groups, fields, and statistical means, and some that include the freedom of the performers. Engagement with serialism shaped the music of the second half of the century even where its procedures were rejected.

Performance practice

Reckon with high precision in all parameters: dynamic markings for individual notes, complex rhythms, constantly changing articulation. Count in fine subdivisions instead of relying on your ear, and practise complicated rhythms slowly at first with the metronome at the smallest common subdivision. Practise pitches with reference notes and work separately on intonation. Take the rests seriously.

Get an overview of the layout of the work from the preface or from the literature. Even where the system is not audible, knowing it helps when practising: whoever knows the order finds connections and remembers sequences more easily. With very complex rhythms, check whether a simplified way of counting can be agreed upon without changing the result.