# Intro to Serialism



## Notung (Jun 12, 2013)

Is there any way for a musically illiterate listener to properly appreciate the workings and execution of twelve-tone serialism? I like the sound, but feel as if it's full effect is lost on me.

Advice?


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Just go with the sound. Enjoy what you can of what you hear, just as you would do with something diatonically "tonal". Much serial music is fascinating in its tone colors. Orchestration plays a major role for the serialists, just as vivid contrasts of color, line, and texture play a role for abstract paintings. You appreciate twelve-tone music the way you appreciate modern art -- all you need understand is that a painting is "paint on canvas" whether it is a portrait of a woman like Mona Lisa or a series of swirling colors as on Jackson Pollock's _Lavender Mist_. You look at and see paint on canvas. With music it is organized instrumental sounds, whether those sounds follow some sort of regular frequency intervals or not. Enjoy the sounds. Enjoy the shape, the form. Enjoy the emotions provoked. There's a lot going on to enjoy. And remember -- you needn't like everything, anymore than you need like all of the Beethoven symphonies.







*Lavender Mist by Jackson Pollock*


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

These are pieces which are motif-based, so I think they may be more "accessible" and "intelligible" for a newcomer:

Webern - Concerto for 9 instruments. (pay attention to the motif and its transformations; note the motivic consistency)

Babbitt - All Set. (note the repeated notes pattern in the different lines, it works as a kind of motif)

Arnold Schoenberg - Piano Concerto. (very easy to follow, the gestures are mozartian in nature)

Babbitt - Semi-Simple Variations. (very clever and funny variations)

Webern - Piano variations. (one of the masterpieces of the genre; the variations are easy to follow; again, incredible motivic consistency because of Webern's trademark use of the technique)


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Pierre Boulez participated in an interesting discussion here about how the post WWII avant-garde, the so-called "Darmstadt School", differs from the music that came before.

The crux of it is that in older music, one would hear the theme, and thus be able to track it through its various developments and returns as they arrive in linear time (this is what he means when he says "memory"), while in newer music, recognizing a single theme is no longer specifically important to the meaning of a passage as much as realizing that this passage and that passage are both developments of the same "things", so even if those inner workings remain more or less opaque, it is eminently clear that everything here is meant to be together and there is still a kind of progression through it.

Beyond some of the basic things that he mentions, though, be aware that:
1) All 12-tone/serial composers are individual enough that understanding/liking/appreciating one doesn't mean you'll like appreciate all or any others, or even other works by the same composer.
2) Listening to it as if it has no connection with any music you've ever heard before is not an effective way to understanding. Appreciating the links between Brahms, Mahler, and Strauss to Schoenberg and his students is important, as is recognizing how Boulez employs techniques from Messiaen, Varese, and Stravinsky as well as Webern.
3) Even if something sounds cluttered at first, you may find it seems clear after a few listens, or if you come back to it later.


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## Notung (Jun 12, 2013)

aleazk said:


> These are pieces which are motif-based, so I think they may be more "accessible" and "intelligible" for a newcomer:
> 
> Webern - Concerto for 9 instruments. (pay attention to the motif and its transformations; note the motivic consistency)
> 
> ...


I love that piano concerto, btw. One of the first serialist works I genuinely liked.

Regarding the Webern concerto. Very organic piece, actually. To my ears, a motif is stated at the beginning of each movement (almost traditional) and is subtly changed. It almost becomes a bass-line. The piano in the second movement caught my attention; intoning only 3 or 4 notes at a time. The instruments interact logically, mathematically, yet naturally. Love it!


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## Guest (Jun 26, 2014)

I'm probably alone here, and Xavier would be mad at me for suggesting an education, but it all started to really "click" for me after I had randomly wound up on the twelve-tone technique wikipedia article and began playing with tone rows and their sounds later that day. After hearing how various bizarre harmonies and melodies would come out of different rows, the music of Schoenberg/Berg/Webern IMMEDIATELY ceased to be alien to me, and Boulez/Nono/Carter/etc would follow soon.


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## Notung (Jun 12, 2013)

Mahlerian, the first Schoenberg piece you posted was great. Parsing out certain patterns and even rhythms made the music make a lot of sense. I even found myself swaying and "tapping" my foot to it. I do notice the tight and intertwined structure you mentioned (though the heart still remains opaque). I'm really liking this music!


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## Alypius (Jan 23, 2013)

Notung, The first serial work that made musical sense to me was Berg's _Violin Concerto_. You described yourself as "musically illiterate," but consider reading the Wikipedia article on Berg's _Concerto_. Here it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_Concerto_(Berg)
It has a diagram with the tone row and a pretty good explanation of how it works in this piece. It also has an audio track that plays the tone row. Look at the row as you listen to the piece and see if that helps. Then here's a YouTube with the score:






Even if you're not very familiar with reading music, just following a video like this with the score might give you a little insight; you can see the ups and downs, the tempo changes, the interplay between soloist and orchestra. Hope that is of some help.


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## Alypius (Jan 23, 2013)

It occurred to me that if looking at a score proves unhelpful, perhaps seeing a serial work danced might help. Here's the YouTube of Stravinsky's _Agon_ ballet, with Balanchine's choreography. It's danceable serialism. Here's the first of three parts.






Here's the links to the other two parts:









Let me append some notes that I took on the work from Alex Ross' _The Rest Is Noise_:



> If Stravinsky's twelve-tone writing failed to satisfy the implacable Boulez, it did restore the composer's faith in himself. Despite the change of technique, characteristic traits and tics remained. Like Berg before him, Stravinsky manipulated the series in order to generate whatever material, tonal or atonal, he required; and he delighted in the hidden continuities that emerge from repetitions of the twelve-tone row--'like so many changes in a peal of bells,' to quote Stephen Walsh. In other words Stravinsky's old bopping, bouncing patterns keep churning beneath the variegated surface....
> Agon came into being at the behest of George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, the choreographer and impresario, respectively, of the New York City ballet.... Stravinsky filled Balanchine's time slots down to the second; Balanchine invented moves that were organically related to Stravinsky's gestures, at once athletic and abstract ... Kirstein had sent along a copy of Francois de Lauze's seventeenth-century manual Apologie de la danse; Stravinsky and Balanchine eventually decided to translate these ancient steps into modern forms, radically reinventing them in the process...
> This last great Stravinsky ballet, for twelve dancers in twelve sections, mixes sounds and styles from several centuries of musical history as well as from several decades of the composer's career. Regal, neo-Renaissance trumpet fanfares set the piece in motion and return several times as organizing punctuation. Driving Rite-like rhythms and creeping chromatic lines give shape to the Double and Triple Pas-de-Quatre. Stately Baroque rhythms decorate the Sarabande, surreal Renaissance twanglings animate the Galliarde. Twelve-tone writing comes into play in the Coda of the First Pas-de-Trois, joined to scrappy violin solos that recall Histoire du soldat. Tensely expressive string lines, vaguely reminiscent of Berg's Lyric Suite, make for a melancholy Pas de Deux. Finally, in the Four Duos and Four Trios, the archaic-modern ritual acquires a jitter of jazz.
> All this is highly absorbing in itself, but the music really pulses with life when it is played alongside the Balanchine action that Stravinsky had in mind as he wrote: the streetwise look of the dancers in their rehearsal clothes; the four males standing stone-still at the outset of the piece, their backs turned to the audience; the acting out of the smallest details in the score, not just the rhythms but the placement of chords high or low, the differentiation of timbre, the lengthening or shortening of note values; the way the dancers register beats in every part of their bodies, with twitchings of the shoulder, snaps of the wrist, extensions or lashings of the arm; and the cohesiveness of the entire conception, reconciling brain and body, the cerebral and the sexual."-Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise, p. 422-424.


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## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

Continuous motivic cell development was discovered by many composers around the same time, perhaps as a modern alternative to the German style thematic development. However, It was already preconceived in the late music of Brahms and Bruckner. Here the 'conservative' Sibelius demonstrates his own brand of it (with all the necessary repetitions).






(don't miss the original version in four movements with bitonal passages)

Boulez revealing some of his techniques:


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Notung said:


> Is there any way for a musically illiterate listener to properly appreciate the workings and execution of twelve-tone serialism? I like the sound, but feel as if it's full effect is lost on me.
> 
> Advice?


This 'feeling as if it's full effect is lost on me' describes a basic disconnect.
If you feel that the music somehow 'holds more information than you can grasp,' then realize that even the composer does not 'completely grasp it' either, and that he has constructed music according to schemes that are not immediately graspable in listening, but are 'hidden' within the structure, unlike tonality and minimalism, which yield their generating processes on the surface, and are self evident.

In tonality, the structure of the music is based on degrees of sonance (consonance/dissonance) and the way this sound is resolved, which is an audible, sensual phenomenon. This audibility of sonance is built into the structure of the music, and most of it is readily perceptible as sensual phenomena.

Not so with serialism; its structures are derived in the cerebral, geometric realm of symmetry and numerical division.
There_* is *_a sensual dimension, in the use of intervals, but even these are not related to "one" note, and thus change constantly and are regarded in isolation.

This way of structuring music does not lend itself to recognition of long strings of relations as easily as tonality, and thus a 'listening in the moment' is required at all times.

With serial music, all we have is a result. The cause is something which we need not concern ourselves with, because it never was based on audible structuring as in tonality, but on geometric and numerical structuring which do not correspond to audible sounds, as tonality's ratios do.

In many cases of serialism, the composer has constructed a 'labyrinth' which, once entered, one becomes 'lost,' and this includes the composer, after he has constructed it.

So look at your 'disconnect' as a sense of perpetual mystery; you, or no one, even the composer, will ever be able to completely grasp the work's complexity; it stands apart, separated from our immediate grasp.


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

^ I enjoyed the explanation  but I don't find myself being as hopelessly alienated and discombobulated as you make it seem.



millionrainbows said:


> ...a sense of perpetual mystery; ...no one... will ever be able to completely grasp the work's complexity; it stands apart, separated from our immediate grasp.


Rather, I think of it as music that never runs out of aha moments


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

millionrainbows said:


> So look at your 'disconnect' as a sense of perpetual mystery; you, or no one, even the composer, will ever be able to completely grasp the work's complexity; it stands apart, separated from our immediate grasp.


Do you think this unknowability is also present in old music, late Beethoven and late Bach?

Your comment is interesting because Proust says exactly the opposite. Proust thinks that a fundamental difference between knowing people and knowing music is that, with people, the longer you're acquainted with them, the more mysterious they seem (That's what happens with Marcel's understanding of Albertine in the novel.) But with music, the mystery decreases with repeated listening. I don't believe Proust was aware of Schoenberg's atonal music, so if you're right, and if Proust's right, this may be a real interesting difference between old and new music.

By the way, until I read your post I used to think this difference between serial/atonal and other ways of composing is academic. I just listen and enjoy, if the music's good then I will feel it.


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## Notung (Jun 12, 2013)

Thanks everyone! Your guidance has led me to a deeper enjoyment of serialism. I have to say, now that I've grappled with it... I can't get enough of it!


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

For me, the beauty of serialism and the tone row came from studying the score of Anton Webern's Piano Variations, Op. 27. The rows used are extraordinary for their symmetry. Wiki tells us:

A particularly notable feature of _Variations_ is symmetry, which is featured throughout the work. Horizontal symmetry can be observed, for example, in successive phrases of the first movement: bars 1-18 comprise four phrases, each built from the normal row and its retrograde stated simultaneously, and the second half of the phrase is always a reverse of the first. Each phrase is therefore a palindrome, though only the first pair of rows in the beginning of the movement is perfectly palindromic.[12] Vertical symmetry pervades the second movement, which is a canon. The pitches are arranged around the pitch axis of A4. Each downward reaching interval is replicated exactly in the opposite direction.[13]

An introductory analysis of the piece can be found here: http://ems.music.uiuc.edu/courses/tipei/M104/Notes/webern.html

Anton Webern: Variations, Op 27 (1936) Glenn Gould, piano


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