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94-641: The term is also occasionally used to describe music that is neither tonal nor serial , especially the pre- twelve-tone music of the Second Viennese School , principally Alban Berg , Arnold Schoenberg , and Anton Webern . However, "as a categorical label, 'atonal' generally means only that the piece is in the Western tradition and is not 'tonal ' ", although there are longer periods, e.g., medieval, renaissance, and modern modal music to which this definition does not apply. "Serialism arose partly as

188-428: A pitch center ; a composer can create music centered on one or more of the row's constituent pitches by emphasizing or avoiding these subsets, respectively, as well as through other, more complex compositional devices. To serialize other elements of music, a system quantifying an identifiable element must be created or defined (this is called " parametrization ", after the term in mathematics). For example, if duration

282-453: A set —or row —of pitches or pitch classes ) is used in order or manipulated in particular ways to give a piece unity. "Serial" is often broadly used to describe all music written in what Schoenberg called "The Method of Composing with Twelve Notes related only to one another", or dodecaphony , and methods that evolved from his methods. It is sometimes used more specifically to apply only to music in which at least one element other than pitch

376-463: A "cross-cultural musical universal" may be found in the music or in the making of music, including performance, hearing, conception, and education. One aspect that is important to bear in mind when examining multi-cultural associations is that an English-language word (i.e. the word "music"), not a universal concept, is the object of scrutiny. For this reason it is important to approach apparently equivalent words in other languages with caution. Based on

470-543: A basic cell or the linking of two or more basic cells". Regarding the post-tonal music of Perle, one theorist wrote: "While ... montages of discrete-seeming elements tend to accumulate global rhythms other than those of tonal progressions and their rhythms, there is a similarity between the two sorts of accumulates spatial and temporal relationships: a similarity consisting of generalized arching tone-centers linked together by shared background referential materials". Another approach of composition techniques for atonal music

564-459: 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. Twelve-tone serialism first appeared in

658-433: 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 . 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). He worked independently of

752-440: A contributing problem is that the word "serial" is seldom if ever defined. In many published analyses of individual pieces the term is used while actual meaning is skated around. Due to Babbitt's work, in the mid-20th century serialist thought became rooted in set theory and began to use a quasi-mathematical vocabulary for the manipulation of the basic sets. Musical set theory is often used to analyze and compose serial music, and

846-445: A culture by their different constraints to distinguishing independent parameters within music, such as melody, harmony, timbre, "etc." The first person to apply the term parameter to music may have been Joseph Schillinger , though its relative popularity may be due to Werner Meyer-Eppler . Gradation is gradual change within one parameter, or an overlapping of two blocks of sound. Meyer lists melody, rhythm, timbre, harmony, "and

940-520: A fashion that goes beyond Webern but was less thoroughgoing than the later practices of Babbitt and European postwar composers. 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. The idea of organizing pitch and rhythm according to similar or related principles

1034-486: A few yet to follow soon were termed 'atonal,' by I know not whom, and I prefer not to know, for in no sense does the term make sense. Not only does the music employ 'tones,' but it employs precisely the same 'tones,' the same physical materials, that music had employed for some two centuries. In all generosity, 'atonal' may have been intended as a mildly analytically derived term to suggest 'atonic' or to signify 'a-triadic tonality', but, even so there were infinitely many things

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1128-454: A limited number of elements". Stockhausen described the final synthesis in this manner: 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

1222-441: A masked trio silently mimes playing instruments. In this example sound, a common element, is excluded, while gesture, a less common element, is given primacy. However Nattiez goes on to say that despite special cases where sound is not immediately obvious (because it is heard in the mind): "sound is a minimal condition of the musical fact". There is disagreement about whether some aspects of music are universal , as well as whether

1316-563: A means of composing atonal music . "Serial music" is a problematic term because it is used differently in different languages and especially because, shortly after its coinage in French, it underwent essential alterations during its transmission to German. The term's use in connection with music was first introduced in French by René Leibowitz in 1947, and immediately afterward by Humphrey Searle in English, as an alternative translation of

1410-501: A means of organizing more coherently the relations used in the pre-serial 'free atonal' music. ... Thus, many useful and crucial insights about even strictly serial music depend only on such basic atonal theory". Late 19th- and early 20th-century composers such as Alexander Scriabin , Claude Debussy , Béla Bartók , Paul Hindemith , Sergei Prokofiev , Igor Stravinsky , and Edgard Varèse have written music that has been described, in full or in part, as atonal. While music without

1504-407: A method of composition using series of pitches, rhythms, dynamics, timbres or other musical elements . Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg 's twelve-tone technique , though some of his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as a form of post-tonal thinking. Twelve-tone technique orders the twelve notes of the chromatic scale , forming a row or series and providing

1598-516: A mode of composition called "total serialism", in which every aspect of a piece, not just pitch, is serially constructed. 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. The serialization of rhythm , 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

1692-421: A more extensive explanation of the serialism (and atonality) controversy. Within the community of modern music, exactly what constituted serialism was also a matter of debate. The conventional English usage is that the word "serial" applies to all twelve-tone music, which is a subset of serial music, and it is this usage that is generally intended in reference works. Nevertheless, a large body of music exists that

1786-401: A piece as being in one key or another". Composer Walter Piston , on the other hand, said that, out of long habit, whenever performers "play any little phrase they will hear it in some key—it may not be the right one, but the point is they will play it with a tonal sense. ... [T]he more I feel I know Schoenberg's music the more I believe he thought that way himself. ... And it isn't only

1880-462: A preordained set of pitches is repeatedly reconfigured ... The composer's model for the distributive serial process corresponds to a development of the Zwölftonspiel of Josef Matthias Hauer". Goeyvaerts's Nummer 4 provides a classic illustration of the distributive function of seriality: 4 times an equal number of elements of equal duration within an equal global time is distributed in

1974-443: A process, called "inner hearing" or "audiation", where the music is heard in the mind as if it were being played. This suggests that while sound is often considered a required aspect of music, it might not be. Jean Molino points out that "any element belonging to the total musical fact can be isolated, or taken as a strategic variable of musical production." Nattiez gives as examples Mauricio Kagel 's Con Voce [with voice], where

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2068-437: A series of "process-plan" works in the late 1960s, as well as later in portions of Licht , the cycle of seven operas he composed between 1977 and 2003. 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

2162-419: A set of foundational assumptions in terms of which the compositions that are collectively designated by the expression 'atonal music' can be said to represent 'a system' of composition". Equal-interval chords are often of indeterminate root, mixed-interval chords are often best characterized by their interval content, while both lend themselves to atonal contexts. Perle also points out that structural coherence

2256-451: 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. Stravinsky's adoption of twelve-tone serial techniques shows

2350-415: A succession of different situations that are sometimes chromatic and dissonant and sometimes diatonic and consonant. In his opera Votre Faust ( Your Faust , 1960–68) Pousseur used many quotations, themselves arranged into a "scale" for serial treatment. This "generalised" serialism (in the strongest possible sense) aims not to exclude any musical phenomena, no matter how heterogeneous, in order "to control

2444-407: A symmetry with respect to the axis formed by 0 and 6. If we carry on with our example [0 3 6] becomes [0 9 6]. An important characteristic are the invariants, which are the notes which stay identical after a transformation. No difference is made between the octave in which the note is played so that, for example, all C ♯ s are equivalent, no matter the octave in which they actually occur. This

2538-465: A tonal center had been previously written, for example Franz Liszt 's Bagatelle sans tonalité of 1885, it is with the coming of the twentieth century that the term atonality began to be applied to pieces, particularly those written by Arnold Schoenberg and The Second Viennese School. The term "atonality" was coined in 1907 by Joseph Marx in a scholarly study of tonality, which was later expanded into his doctoral thesis. Their music arose from what

2632-461: A tone row. A hexachord that is self-complementing for a particular permutation is called prime combinatorial . A hexachord that is self-complementing for all the canonic operations— inversion , retrograde , and retrograde inversion —is called all-combinatorial . Aspects of music Music can be analysed by considering a variety of its elements, or parts (aspects, characteristics, features), individually or together. A commonly used list of

2726-406: A unifying basis for a composition's melody , harmony , structural progressions, and variations . Other types of serialism also work with sets , collections of objects, but not necessarily with fixed-order series, and extend the technique to other musical dimensions (often called " parameters "), such as duration , dynamics , and timbre . The idea of serialism is also applied in various ways in

2820-413: Is a method, "highly specialized technique", or "way" of composition . It may also be considered "a philosophy of life ( Weltanschauung ), a way of relating the human mind to the world and creating a completeness when dealing with a subject". Serialism is not by itself a system of composition or a style. Neither is pitch serialism necessarily incompatible with tonality, though it is most often used as

2914-404: Is also sometimes used in tonal and nonserial atonal analysis. The basis for serial composition is Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, where the 12 notes of the chromatic scale are organized into a row. This "basic" row is then used to create permutations, that is, rows derived from the basic set by reordering its elements. The row may be used to produce a set of intervals, or a composer may derive

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3008-547: Is also suggested by both Henry Cowell 's New Musical Resources (1930) and the work of Joseph Schillinger . the first time I ever heard Webern in a concert performance …[t]he impression it made on me was the same as I was to experience a few years later when … I first laid eyes on a Mondriaan canvas...: those things, of which I had acquired an extremely intimate knowledge, came across as crude and unfinished when seen in reality. Karel Goeyvaerts on Anton Webern 's music. Some music theorists have criticized serialism on

3102-430: Is called "serial" but does not employ note-rows at all, let alone twelve-tone technique, e.g., Stockhausen's Klavierstücke I–IV (which use permuted sets), his Stimmung (with pitches from the overtone series , which is also used as the model for the rhythms), and Pousseur's Scambi (where the permuted sounds are made exclusively from filtered white noise ). When serialism is not limited to twelve-tone techniques,

3196-401: Is given by Allen Forte who developed the theory behind atonal music. Forte describes two main operations: transposition and inversion . Transposition can be seen as a rotation of t either clockwise or anti-clockwise on a circle, where each note of the chord is rotated equally. For example, if t = 2 and the chord is [0 3 6], transposition (clockwise) will be [2 5 8]. Inversion can be seen as

3290-443: Is more a referential abstraction than a description of the concrete reality of a musical work that is termed "serial". A series may be divided into subsets, and the members of the aggregate not part of a subset are said to be its complement . A subset is self-complementing if it contains half of the set and its complement is also a permutation of the original subset. This is most commonly seen with hexachords , six-note segments of

3384-453: Is most often achieved through operations on intervallic cells. A cell "may operate as a kind of microcosmic set of fixed intervallic content, statable either as a chord or as a melodic figure or as a combination of both. Its components may be fixed with regard to order, in which event it may be employed, like the twelve-tone set, in its literal transformations. … Individual tones may function as pivotal elements, to permit overlapping statements of

3478-563: Is normally heard on the thematic or linear level. That is, centricity may be established through the repetition of a central pitch or from emphasis by means of instrumentation, register, rhythmic elongation, or metric accent. Swiss conductor, composer, and musical philosopher Ernest Ansermet , a critic of atonal music, wrote extensively on this in the book Les fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine (The Foundations of Music in Human Consciousness), where he argued that

3572-451: Is not an order of succession, but indeed a hierarchy—which may be independent of this order of succession". Rules of analysis derived from twelve-tone theory do not apply to serialism of the second type: "in particular the ideas, one, that the series is an intervallic sequence, and two, that the rules are consistent". For example, Stockhausen's early serial works, such as Kreuzspiel and Formel , "advance in unit sections within which

3666-407: Is played out. And the chromatic total remains active only, and provisionally, as a general reference. In the 1960s Pousseur took this a step further, applying a consistent set of predefined transformations to preexisting music. One example is the large orchestral work Couleurs croisées ( Crossed Colours , 1967), which performs these transformations on the protest song " We Shall Overcome ", creating

3760-545: Is serialized, a set of durations must be specified; if tone colour (timbre) is serialized, a set of separate tone colours must be identified; and so on. The selected set or sets, their permutations and derived sets form the composer's basic material. Composition using twelve-tone serial methods focuses on each appearance of the collection of twelve chromatic notes, called an aggregate . (Sets of more or fewer pitches, or of elements other than pitch, may be treated analogously.) One principle operative in some serial compositions

3854-465: Is that no element of the aggregate should be reused in the same contrapuntal strand (statement of a series) until all the other members have been used, and each member must appear only in its place in the series. Yet, since most serial compositions have multiple (at least two, sometimes as many as a few dozen) series statements occurring concurrently, interwoven with each other in time, and feature repetitions of some of their pitches, this principle as stated

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3948-442: Is treated as a row or series. Such methods are often called post-Webernian serialism . Other terms used to make the distinction are twelve-note serialism for the former and integral serialism for the latter. A row may be assembled pre-compositionally (perhaps to embody particular intervallic or symmetrical properties), or derived from a spontaneously invented thematic or motivic idea. The row's structure does not in itself define

4042-432: Is why the 12-note scale is represented by a circle. This leads us to the definition of the similarity between two chords which considers the subsets and the interval content of each chord. The term "atonality" itself has been controversial. Arnold Schoenberg , whose music is generally used to define the term, was vehemently opposed to it, arguing that "The word 'atonal' could only signify something entirely inconsistent with

4136-508: The Quintette [ à la mémoire d’Anton Webern , 1955], and from around the time of Impromptu [1955] encounters whole new dimensions of application and new functions. The twelve-tone series loses its imperative function as a prohibiting, regulating, and patterning authority; its working-out is abandoned through its own constant-frequent presence: all 66 intervallic relations among the 12 pitches being virtually present. Prohibited intervals, like

4230-1408: The visual arts , design , and architecture , and the musical concept has also been adapted in literature. Integral serialism or total serialism is the use of series for aspects such as duration, dynamics, and register as well as pitch. Other terms, used especially in Europe to distinguish post-World War II serial music from twelve-tone music and its American extensions, are general serialism and multiple serialism . Composers such as Arnold Schoenberg , Anton Webern , Alban Berg , Karlheinz Stockhausen , Pierre Boulez , Luigi Nono , Milton Babbitt , Elisabeth Lutyens , Henri Pousseur , Charles Wuorinen and Jean Barraqué used serial techniques of one sort or another in most of their music. Other composers such as Tadeusz Baird , Béla Bartók , Luciano Berio , Bruno Maderna , Franco Donatoni , Benjamin Britten , John Cage , Aaron Copland , Ernst Krenek , György Ligeti , Olivier Messiaen , Arvo Pärt , Walter Piston , Ned Rorem , Alfred Schnittke , Ruth Crawford Seeger , Dmitri Shostakovich , and Igor Stravinsky used serialism only in some of their compositions or only in some sections of pieces, as did some jazz composers, such as Bill Evans , Yusef Lateef , Bill Smith , and even rock musicians like Frank Zappa . Serialism

4324-440: The "information extracted", "perceptual opacity", "auditive presentation" (and constraints thereof) pertain to what defines serialism, namely use of a series. And since Schoenberg remarked, "in the later part of a work, when the set [series] had already become familiar to the ear", it has been assumed that serial composers expect their series to be aurally perceived. This principle even became the premise of empirical investigation in

4418-403: The "raw materials" of music in order of their supposed discovery: rhythm, melody, and harmony; including counterpoint and orchestration . Near the end of the twentieth century music scholarship began to give more attention to social and physical elements of music. For example: performance , social , gender , dance , and theatre . Does the definition of music determine its aspects, or does

4512-574: The 1920s, with antecedents predating that decade (instances of 12-note passages occur in Liszt's Faust Symphony and in Bach. ) 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. In Schoenberg's own words, his goal of l'invention contrariée was to show constraint in composition. Consequently, some reviewers have jumped to

4606-452: 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. 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

4700-524: The Europeans. 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 thematicism . Instead of a recurring, referential row, "each musical component is subjected to control by a series of numerical proportions". In Europe, some serial and non-serial music of

4794-496: The German Zwölftontechnik ( twelve-tone technique ) or Reihenmusik (row music); it was independently introduced by Stockhausen and Herbert Eimert into German in 1955 as serielle Musik , with a different meaning, but also translated as "serial music". Serialism of the first type is most specifically defined as a structural principle according to which a recurring series of ordered elements (normally

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4888-457: The audibility of tone rows, and the portion of his essay focusing on Boulez's "multiplication" technique (exemplified in three movements of Le Marteau sans maître ) has been challenged on perceptual grounds by Stephen Heinemann and Ulrich Mosch. Ruwet's critique has also been criticised for making "the fatal mistake of equating visual presentation (a score) with auditive presentation (the music as heard)". In all these reactions discussed above,

4982-798: The basis that its compositional strategies are often incompatible with the way the human mind processes a piece of music. Nicolas Ruwet (1959) was one of the first to criticise serialism by a comparison with linguistic structures, citing theoretical claims by Boulez and Pousseur, taking as specific examples bars from Stockhausen's Klavierstücke I & II , and calling for a general reexamination of Webern's music. Ruwet specifically names three works as exempt from his criticism: Stockhausen's Zeitmaße and Gruppen , and Boulez's Le marteau sans maître . In response, Pousseur questioned Ruwet's equivalence between phonemes and notes. He also suggested that, if analysis of Le marteau sans maître and Zeitmaße , "performed with sufficient insight", were to be made from

5076-543: The classical musical language was a precondition for musical expression with its clear, harmonious structures. Ansermet argued that a tone system can only lead to a uniform perception of music if it is deduced from just a single interval. For Ansermet this interval is the fifth. In France, on December 20, 2012, French pianist Jérôme Ducros gave a conference at the Collège de France entitled Atonalism. And after? as part of Karol Beffa 's chair of artistic creation. He compares

5170-450: The combination of certain aspects determine the definition of music? For example, intensional definitions list aspects or elements that make up their subject. Some definitions refer to music as a score, or a composition: music can be read as well as heard, and a piece of music written but never played is a piece of music notwithstanding. According to Edward E. Gordon the process of reading music , at least for trained musicians, involves

5264-480: The concept of music is universal. This debate often hinges on definitions. For instance, the fairly common assertion that "tonality" is a universal of all music may necessarily require an expansive definition of tonality. A pulse is sometimes taken as a universal, yet there exist solo vocal and instrumental genres with free and improvisational rhythm—no regular pulse —one example being the alap section of an Indian classical music performance. Harwood questions whether

5358-460: The conclusion that serialism acted as a predetermined method of composing to avoid the subjectivity and ego of a composer in favour of calculated measure and proportion. Along with John Cage 's indeterminate music (music composed with the use of chance operations) and Werner Meyer-Eppler 's aleatoricism , serialism was enormously influential in postwar music. Theorists such as Milton Babbitt and George Perle codified serial systems, leading to

5452-587: The densely packed dots in Seurat 's paintings, even though the concept was unrelated. 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 ", 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

5546-426: The discursive properties of tonal language and non-tonal languages, largely giving the advantage to the former, and considers the return of tonality as inevitable. This conference sparked a heated controversy in the French musical world. An example of atonal music would be Arnold Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire”, which is a song cycle composed in 1912. The work uses a technique called “Sprechstimme” or spoken singing, and

5640-452: 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 " punktuelle Musik" ("pointist" or "punctual music"), then in French "musique ponctuelle", but quickly confused with " pointillistic " (German "pointillistische", French "pointilliste"), the term associated with

5734-572: The effects of tonal determinism, dialectize its causal functions, and overcome any academic prohibitions, especially the fixing of an anti-grammar meant to replace some previous one". At about the same time, Stockhausen began using serial methods to integrate a variety of musical sources from recorded examples of folk and traditional music from around the world in his electronic composition Telemusik (1966), and from national anthems in Hymnen (1966–67). He extended this serial "polyphony of styles" in

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5828-410: The end of World War II . After Schoenberg's death, Igor Stravinsky used the twelve-tone technique. Iannis Xenakis generated pitch sets from mathematical formulae, and also saw the expansion of tonal possibilities as part of a synthesis between the hierarchical principle and the theory of numbers, principles which have dominated music since at least the time of Parmenides . The twelve-tone technique

5922-422: The exceptional and the normal became more and more blurred. As a result, there was a "concomitant loosening" of the synthetic bonds through which tones and harmonies had been related to one another. The connections between harmonies were uncertain even on the lowest chord-to-chord level. On higher levels, long-range harmonic relationships and implications became so tenuous, that they hardly functioned at all. At best,

6016-481: The felt probabilities of the style system had become obscure. At worst, they were approaching a uniformity, which provided few guides for either composition or listening. The first phase, known as "free atonality" or "free chromaticism", involved a conscious attempt to avoid traditional diatonic harmony. Works of this period include the opera Wozzeck (1917–1922) by Alban Berg and Pierrot lunaire (1912) by Schoenberg. The second phase, begun after World War I ,

6110-451: The guise of "probe-tone" experiments testing listeners' familiarity with a row after exposure to its various forms (as would occur in a 12-tone work). In other words the supposition in critiques of serialism has been that, if a composition is so intricately structured by and around a series, that series should ultimately be clearly perceived or that a listener ought to become aware of its presence or importance. Babbitt denied this: That's not

6204-479: The inspiration for serialism. Atonality emerged as a pejorative term to condemn music in which chords were organized seemingly with no apparent coherence. In Nazi Germany , atonal music was attacked as " Bolshevik " and labeled as degenerate ( Entartete Musik ) along with other music produced by enemies of the Nazi regime. Many composers had their works banned by the regime, not to be played until after its collapse at

6298-442: The laws of perception and complying better with them, "paved the way to a more effective kind of musical communication, without in the least abandoning the emancipation that they had been allowed to achieve by this 'zero state' that was punctual music". One way this was achieved was by developing the concept of "groups", which allows structural relationships to be defined not only between individual notes but also at higher levels, up to

6392-762: The level of influence serialism had after the Second World War. Previously Stravinsky had used series of notes without rhythmic or harmonic implications. Because many of the basic techniques of serial composition have analogs in traditional counterpoint, uses of inversion , 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

6486-551: The light of serial techniques; for example, they found the use of row technique in previous composers going back to Mozart and Beethoven. In particular, the orchestral outburst that introduces the development section halfway through the last movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 40 is a tone row that Mozart punctuates in a very modern and violent way that Michael Steinberg called "rude octaves and frozen silences". Ruth Crawford Seeger extended serial control to parameters other than pitch and to formal planning as early as 1930–33 in

6580-460: The like" as principal elements of music, while Narmour lists melody, harmony, rhythm, dynamics, tessitura, timbre, tempo, meter, texture, "and perhaps others". According to McClellan, two things should be considered, the quality or state of an element and its change over time. Alan P. Merriam proposed a theoretical research model that assumes three aspects are always present in musical activity: concept, behaviour, and sound. Virgil Thomson lists

6674-578: The line of temporal-based deductions in association with musical composition, denoting music's primary components as "time, pitch, and texture." Most definitions of music include a reference to sound and sound perception can be divided into six cognitive processes. They are: pitch , duration , loudness , timbre , sonic texture and spatial location . A 'parameter' is any element that can be manipulated ( composed ) separately from other elements or focused on separately in an educational context. Leonard B. Meyer compares distinguishing parameters within

6768-493: The main elements includes pitch , timbre , texture , volume , duration , and form . The elements of music may be compared to the elements of art or design . According to Howard Gardner , there is little dispute about the principal constituent elements of music, though experts differ on their precise definitions. Harold Owen bases his list on the qualities of sound: pitch, timbre, intensity, and duration while John Castellini excludes duration. Gordon C. Bruner II follows

6862-401: The many disparate definitions that can be found just in English language dictionaries, ) it seems there is no agreement on what the word "music" means in English, let alone determining a potentially equivalent word from another culture. Kenneth Gourlay describes how, since different cultures include different elements in their definitions of music, dance, and related concepts, translation of

6956-572: The most equable way, unequally with regard to one another, over the temporal space: from the greatest possible coïncidence to the greatest possible dispersion. This provides an exemplary demonstration of that logical principle of seriality: every situation must occur once and only once . Henri Pousseur , after initially working with twelve-tone technique in works like Sept Versets (1950) and Trois Chants sacrés (1951), evolved away from this bond in Symphonies pour quinze Solistes [1954–55] and in

7050-401: The music is atonal, meaning that there is no clear tonal center or key. Instead, the notes of the chromatic scale function independently of each other, and the harmonies do not follow the traditional tonal hierarchy found in classical music. The result is a dissonant and jarring sound that is quite different from the harmonies found in tonal music. Serialism In music, serialism is

7144-505: The music was not". "Atonal" developed a certain vagueness in meaning as a result of its use to describe a wide variety of compositional approaches that deviated from traditional chords and chord progressions . Attempts to solve these problems by using terms such as "pan-tonal", "non-tonal", "multi-tonal", "free-tonal" and "without tonal center" instead of "atonal" have not gained broad acceptance. Composer Anton Webern held that "new laws asserted themselves that made it impossible to designate

7238-465: The nature of tone... to call any relation of tones atonal is just as farfetched as it would be to designate a relation of colors aspectral or acomplementary. There is no such antithesis". Composer and theorist Milton Babbitt also disparaged the term, saying "The works that followed, many of them now familiar, include the Five Pieces for Orchestra , Erwartung , Pierrot Lunaire , and they and

7332-426: The octave, and prohibited successional relations, such as premature note repetitions, frequently occur, although obscured in the dense contexture. The number twelve no longer plays any governing, defining rôle; the pitch constellations no longer hold to the limitation determined by their formation. The dodecaphonic series loses its significance as a concrete model of shape (or a well-defined collection of concrete shapes)

7426-854: The overall form of a piece. This is "a structural method par excellence", and a sufficiently simple conception that it remains easily perceptible. Pousseur also points out that serial composers were the first to recognize and attempt to move beyond the lack of differentiation within certain pointillist works. Pousseur later followed up on his own suggestion by developing his idea of "wave" analysis and applying it to Stockhausen's Zeitmaße in two essays. Later writers have continued both lines of reasoning. Fred Lerdahl , for example, in his essay " Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems ", argues that serialism's perceptual opacity ensures its aesthetic inferiority. Lerdahl has in turn been criticized for excluding "the possibility of other, non-hierarchical methods of achieving musical coherence," and for concentrating on

7520-456: The players; it's also the listeners. They will hear tonality in everything". Donald Jay Grout similarly doubted whether atonality is really possible, because "any combination of sounds can be referred to a fundamental root". He defined it as a fundamentally subjective category: "atonal music is music in which the person who is using the word cannot hear tonal centers". One difficulty is that even an otherwise "atonal" work, tonality "by assertion"

7614-406: The point of view of wave theory —taking into account the dynamic interaction of the different component phenomena, which creates "waves" that interact in a sort of frequency modulation —the analysis "would accurately reflect the realities of perception". This was because these composers had long since acknowledged the lack of differentiation found in punctual music and, becoming increasingly aware of

7708-541: The row from a particular succession of intervals. A row that uses all of the intervals in their ascending form once is an all-interval row . In addition to permutations, the basic row may have some set of notes derived from it, which is used to create a new row. These are derived sets . Because there are tonal chord progressions that use all twelve notes, it is possible to create pitch rows with very strong tonal implications, and even to write tonal music using twelve-tone technique. Most tone rows contain subsets that can imply

7802-559: The rules of the common practice period so that what was not allowed is required and what was required is not allowed. This is what was done by Charles Seeger in his explanation of dissonant counterpoint , which is a way to write atonal counterpoint. Kostka and Payne list four procedures as operational in the atonal music of Schoenberg, all of which may be taken as negative rules. Avoidance of melodic or harmonic octaves, avoidance of traditional pitch collections such as major or minor triads, avoidance of more than three successive pitches from

7896-466: The same diatonic scale, and use of disjunct melodies (avoidance of conjunct melodies). Further, Perle agrees with Oster and Katz that, "the abandonment of the concept of a root -generator of the individual chord is a radical development that renders futile any attempt at a systematic formulation of chord structure and progression in atonal music along the lines of traditional harmonic theory". Atonal compositional techniques and results "are not reducible to

7990-406: The structure of a composition, which requires development of a comprehensive strategy. The choice of strategy often depends on the relationships contained in a row class, and rows may be constructed with an eye to producing the relationships needed to form desired strategies. The basic set may have additional restrictions, such as the requirement that it use each interval only once. "The series

8084-429: The subsequent distribution into individual elements brought three concepts into play: 1. Musical elements that had since been secondary to tonal form groups now became autonomous. 2. The absence of tonal coherence prompted the search for a unity that could connect the disjointed musical language in an alternative way. 3. Due to the replacement of diatonic principles, new concepts of form arose. The twelve-tone technique

8178-491: The system. His student, Anton Webern, however, is anecdotally claimed to have begun linking dynamics and tone color to the primary row, making rows not only of pitches but of other aspects of music as well. However, actual analysis of Webern's twelve-tone works has so far failed to demonstrate the truth of this assertion. One analyst concluded, following a minute examination of the Piano Variations, op. 27, that while

8272-528: The texture of this music may superficially resemble that of some serial music ... its structure does not. None of the patterns within separate nonpitch characteristics makes audible (or even numerical) sense in itself . The point is that these characteristics are still playing their traditional role of differentiation. Twelve-tone technique, combined with the parametrization (separate organization of four aspects of music : pitch, attack character, intensity, and duration) of Olivier Messiaen , would be taken as

8366-486: The vagueness and generality of the term. Additionally George Perle explains that, "the 'free' atonality that preceded dodecaphony precludes by definition the possibility of self-consistent, generally applicable compositional procedures". However, he provides one example as a way to compose atonal pieces, a pre-twelve-tone technique piece by Anton Webern, which rigorously avoids anything that suggests tonality, to choose pitches that do not imply tonality. In other words, reverse

8460-425: The way I conceive of a set [series]. This is not a matter of finding the lost [series]. This is not a matter of cryptoanalysis (where's the hidden [series]?). What I'm interested in is the effect it might have, the way it might assert itself not necessarily explicitly. Seemingly in accord with Babbitt's statement, but ranging over such issues as perception, aesthetic value, and the "poietic fallacy", Walter Horn offers

8554-418: Was also preceded by nondodecaphonic serial composition used independently in the works of Alexander Scriabin, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók , Carl Ruggles , and others. "Essentially, Schoenberg and Hauer systematized and defined for their own dodecaphonic purposes a pervasive technical feature of 'modern' musical practice, the ostinato ." Setting out to compose atonal music may seem complicated because of both

8648-412: Was described as the "crisis of tonality" between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in classical music . This situation had arisen over the course of the nineteenth century due to the increasing use of ambiguous chords , improbable harmonic inflections, and more unusual melodic and rhythmic inflections than what was possible within the styles of tonal music. The distinction between

8742-402: Was exemplified by attempts to create a systematic means of composing without tonality, most famously the method of composing with 12 tones or the twelve-tone technique. This period included Berg's Lulu and Lyric Suite , Schoenberg's Piano Concerto , his oratorio Die Jakobsleiter and numerous smaller pieces, as well as his last two string quartets. Schoenberg was the major innovator of

8836-421: Was preceded by Schoenberg's freely atonal pieces of 1908 to 1923, which, though free, often have as an "integrative element...a minute intervallic cell " that in addition to expansion may be transformed as with a tone row, and in which individual notes may "function as pivotal elements, to permit overlapping statements of a basic cell or the linking of two or more basic cells". The decay of the sense of tonality and

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