![]() Speaking of ‘tonal serialism’, the trappings of tonality are not limited to pitch: what composers do with the other parameters is equally important. Benjamin Britten’s Turn of the Screw, which adopts a similarly quartal structure in the row from which both the theme and tonal centres for the acts are serially organized.Įxample 1.links to ‘the quartal harmonic and improvisational stylings of bop and post-bop schools.’ Among the ‘jazzy’ and / or ‘tonal’ elements of this piece is the foregrounding of set which the scholar Horace J. Hale Smith’s Evocation which the composer notes to have an ‘affinity’ with jazz.Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, with its row centered on triads and fifths.40.Ĭonversely, there are 20th century composers who write music that is serially organized in the sense that we would recognize, but in such a way as to embrace the sound world of an extended tonality ( Example 1). Often cited examples include the choice of keys in the development of the finale to Mozart’s Symphony No. There are (equally rare and also rather dubious) cases of tonal works that are said to exhibit the specifically twelve-tone practice of rotating through all the pitches. There are earlier examples, such as the Menuet al Roverso from Haydn’s Symphony No. Non-serial 20th Century examples include a great deal of Bartók, the prelude/postlude pair in Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis, and Britten Cantata Academica movt II (tellingly titled Alla rovescio). The R-form of retrograde symmetry (given by a “vertical” mirror, if you will) is a primarily a 20th Century concern, serial and otherwise. In these cases, the mirror is usually “horizontal”, giving versions of the twelve-tone technique’s I-form. There is a great deal of precedent for general forms of musical thinking pertinent to serial technique, from simple melodic inversion to furiously complex crab canons, and certain works like Bach’s Art of Fugue are notable partly for the strictness and comprehensiveness of design in general, and the healthy dose of ‘mirror writing’ in particular. Schoenberg may or may not have actually said this, but Boulez definitely did later describe every composer to have remained ‘outside the serial experiments’ since their discovery as ‘useless’ (‘Schönberg est mort’, Score, 1952, reproduced in Notes of an Apprenticeship, 1968, p.274). Schoenberg is famously alleged to have described ‘his’ discovery as one ‘which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years’ (Stuckenschmidt 1977, p.277). There’s also a totalizing angle here that’s rather less utopian. It may not be coincidental that it emerged in inter-war Europe, when there may well have been a desire to start anew.Įqual tones? A new world order? Maybe, but the method has served a wide range of composers with correspondingly diverse aims, so it’s not so straightforward to summarize. It would appear to achieve that end, at least for composers who joined Schoenberg in viewing it as a “method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another” ( Style and Idea, 1975, p.218) – contrast that with the fundamentally hierarchical tonal system. Some grand narratives of 20th century music cast atonality as a logical consequence of a historical trend towards ever more chromaticism, and serialism as a matter of creating a radically different kind of structure out of the total chromatic. Serialism is much discussed and anthologized in addition to all of the technical and analytical details, it’s worth taking a moment at the end of this section to consider where it came from and what it’s “really” about. ![]()
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