Serialism is a way of creating music using different elements like pitches, rhythms, and dynamics. It began mainly with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though other composers at the same time also helped develop serialism as a new approach to music after traditional tonal systems. The twelve-tone technique uses all twelve notes of the chromatic scale in a specific order, forming a row or series that helps shape a piece's melody, harmony, structure, and changes. Other types of serialism use sets of musical elements, which may not follow a fixed order, and apply the method to other aspects of music, such as how long notes last, how loud or soft they are, and the quality of the sound.
The concept of serialism is also used in visual arts, design, and architecture, and the musical idea has been adapted in literature. Integral serialism, or total serialism, uses series to organize aspects like note length, loudness, and pitch range, as well as pitch itself. Other terms, used mainly in Europe, describe different types of serial music after World War II, such as general serialism and multiple serialism.
Composers like 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 in most of their music. Other composers, including 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 in some of their works or in parts of their compositions. Some jazz and rock musicians, such as Bill Evans, Yusef Lateef, Bill Smith, and Frank Zappa, also used serial techniques in certain pieces.
Basic definitions
Serialism is a method, or a special way, of creating music. It can also be thought of as a way of thinking about the world and making music that feels complete when working on a piece.
Serialism is not a complete system of writing music or a specific style. Pitch serialism does not always mean the music is atonal, though it is often used for that purpose.
The term "serial music" can be confusing because it is used differently in various languages. The word was first used in French by René Leibowitz in 1947, and later by Humphrey Searle in English as a translation of the German terms Zwölftontechnik (twelve-tone technique) or Reihenmusik (row music). In 1955, Stockhausen and Herbert Eimert introduced the German term serielle Musik (serial music), which had a slightly different meaning but was also translated as "serial music."
First-type serialism uses a repeating series of ordered elements, such as a set of pitches or pitch classes, to create unity in a piece. The word "serial" is sometimes used broadly to describe music written using Arnold Schoenberg’s method of composing with twelve notes that are related only to each other, called dodecaphony. It can also refer more specifically to music where elements other than pitch, like rhythm or dynamics, are treated as a row or series. These methods are sometimes called post-Webernian serialism. Other terms used to describe these differences are twelve-note serialism for the first type and integral serialism for the second.
A row can be planned before writing the music (perhaps to include specific intervals or symmetry) or created from a theme or motive. The structure of a row does not alone define the structure of a composition; a strategy must be developed. The choice of strategy often depends on the relationships within the row, and rows may be designed to support specific strategies.
The basic set may have rules, such as requiring each interval to appear only once.
"The series is not just a sequence, but a hierarchy that may be separate from the order of the sequence."
Rules from twelve-tone theory do not apply to second-type serialism. For example, Stockhausen’s early serial works, such as Kreuzspiel and Formel, use preordained sets of pitches that are rearranged in sections. His model is based on the Zwölftonspiel (twelve-tone game) by Josef Matthias Hauer. Goeyvaerts’s Nummer 4 also uses similar methods.
Henri Pousseur initially used twelve-tone technique in works like Sept Versets (1950) and Trois Chants sacrés (1951). In the 1960s, he applied consistent transformations to existing music, such as in his orchestral work Couleurs croisées (1967), which reworks the protest song We Shall Overcome into varied musical situations. In his opera Votre Faust (1960–68), he used quotations arranged into a "scale" for serial treatment. This approach, called "generalized serialism," aims to include all musical elements to control tonal influence and avoid restrictions.
Around the same time, Stockhausen used serial methods to combine music from global folk traditions and national anthems in works like Telemusik (1966) and Hymnen (1966–67). He expanded this approach in later works, including parts of his seven-opera cycle Licht (1977–2003).
History of serial music
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, composers faced challenges with a system of musical notes and intervals called "functional tonality." Composers like Debussy and Strauss found ways to expand the rules of this system to express their creative ideas. After a short time of using no clear tonal system (called free atonality), composers such as Schoenberg explored tone rows. A tone row is an ordered sequence of all 12 notes in the chromatic scale, used as the foundation for compositions. This method allowed for new musical expressions and structured organization without relying on traditional harmonic rules.
Twelve-tone serialism, a system based on tone rows, began in the 1920s. Earlier examples of 12-note passages can be found in works by Liszt and Bach. Schoenberg was the most important composer in developing twelve-tone serialism, though others also contributed. Schoenberg aimed to create music with strict rules, which some critics interpreted as a way to avoid personal expression and focus on mathematical precision. In the 1930s, composers like Schoenberg, Krenek, Wolpe, and Eisler moved to the United States to escape World War II, influencing American music and their own work.
Serialism became a major force in postwar music, alongside John Cage’s use of chance operations and Werner Meyer-Eppler’s aleatoricism. Theorists like Milton Babbitt and George Perle developed "total serialism," where every musical element—such as rhythm, dynamics, and timbre—was structured using serial methods. Perle’s 1962 book, Serial Composition and Atonality, explained how Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern influenced serial music.
Olivier Messiaen and his students, including Karel Goeyvaerts and Boulez, helped expand serialism beyond pitch. Messiaen first used a chromatic rhythm scale in his Vingt Regards sur l'enfant-Jésus (1944), and later applied rhythmic series in his Turangalîla-Symphonie (1946–48). The first examples of integral serialism, where all musical elements are controlled by serial methods, appeared in Babbitt’s works from the late 1940s. These compositions were created independently of European composers.
Composers linked to Darmstadt, such as Stockhausen, Goeyvaerts, and Pousseur, developed a form of serialism that avoided repeating tone rows to eliminate any traces of traditional themes. Instead, they used numerical proportions to control musical elements. In Europe, some 1950s music emphasized independent control of each note’s parameters, creating isolated "points" of sound, a style called "punctual music." This concept was sometimes confused with "pointillism," a term from visual art.
Serial techniques were also connected to design movements like de Stijl and Bauhaus, where artists used limited elements and avoided repetition. Composers like Stockhausen described serialism as a method that combined strict rules with creative freedom.
Igor Stravinsky adopted serial techniques after World War II, though he had previously used note sequences without strict rhythmic or harmonic rules. His later works incorporated serial methods, influenced by Schoenberg, Webern, and Messiaen. Scholars also began analyzing classical music through serialism, finding examples of tone rows in works by Mozart and Beethoven. For instance, the development section of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 uses a tone row in a dramatic and modern way.
Ruth Crawford Seeger applied serial methods to elements beyond pitch and structure as early as the 1930s, though her work was less comprehensive than later serialists. Charles Ives’s 1906 song The Cage used a rhythmic pattern with decreasing durations, an early example of arithmetic-based serialism. Similar ideas were explored by Henry Cowell and Joseph Schillinger, who emphasized organizing musical elements through related principles.
Reactions to serialism
The first time I heard Webern's music in a concert, it left a strong impression on me. This was similar to the feeling I had years later when I saw a painting by Mondriaan for the first time. Both experiences made me realize that things I had studied closely in books or theory seemed less complete or rough when I saw or heard them in real life.
Some music theorists have criticized serialism, a method of organizing music, because they believe its techniques can make it harder for people to understand how music works. Nicolas Ruwet (1959) was one of the first to compare serialism to how language works, using ideas from composers like Boulez and Pousseur. He pointed to parts of Stockhausen's Klavierstücke I & II as examples and argued that Webern's music should be studied again. Ruwet said three works—Stockhausen's Zeitmaße and Gruppen, and Boulez's Le marteau sans maître—were not affected by his criticism.
In response, Pousseur disagreed with Ruwet's comparison of speech sounds (phonemes) to musical notes. He suggested that if Le marteau sans maître and Zeitmaße were analyzed using wave theory—considering how different musical elements interact to create patterns similar to sound waves—the analysis would better match how people actually hear music. Pousseur explained that these composers recognized the problems with early serial music, which lacked clear differences between notes. By improving their understanding of how people perceive music, they created better ways to communicate musical ideas without losing the freedom serialism allowed. One way they did this was by grouping musical elements, which helped define relationships between notes and larger structures in a piece. This method made music easier to understand. Pousseur also noted that serial composers were the first to try solving the issues found in some early pointillist works. Later, he expanded his wave theory idea and used it to analyze Stockhausen's Zeitmaße in two essays.
Other writers later continued these discussions. Fred Lerdahl, for example, argued in his essay "Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems" that serialism's difficulty in being understood makes it less artistically valuable. However, Lerdahl was criticized for ignoring other ways to create musical coherence and for focusing too much on tone rows. His analysis of Boulez's "multiplication" technique in Le marteau sans maître was also questioned by others. Ruwet's critique was criticized for confusing how music looks in a score with how it sounds when played.
In all these discussions, the focus was on how serialism uses a series of musical elements. Schoenberg once said that when a musical series becomes familiar to listeners, it should be clearly heard. This idea led to experiments, like "probe-tone" tests, to see if listeners could recognize a musical pattern after hearing it in different forms. Critics of serialism assumed that if a piece is built around a series, that series should be clearly noticeable to listeners. However, Babbitt disagreed with this idea.
Walter Horn later explained the debate over serialism and atonality, discussing topics like perception, artistic value, and the "poietic fallacy."
Within the modern music community, there was also debate about what serialism actually meant. In English, the term "serial" often refers to all twelve-tone music, which is a type of serial music. However, many works labeled as "serial" do not use twelve-tone techniques at all. For example, Stockhausen's Klavierstücke I–IV use permuted sets, his Stimmung uses pitches from the overtone series (which also shapes its rhythms), and Pousseur's Scambi uses filtered white noise instead of note-rows.
A major issue arises when serialism is not limited to twelve-tone methods, as the word "serial" is rarely clearly defined. In many analyses of individual pieces, the term is used without fully explaining its meaning.
Theory of twelve-tone serial music
In the mid-20th century, Babbitt's work helped establish serialist ideas based on set theory. This approach used math-like terms to describe how basic sets of musical elements were changed and rearranged. Musical set theory is often used to study and create serial music. It is also sometimes used to analyze tonal and non-serial atonal music.
The foundation of serial composition comes from Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. This method organizes the 12 notes of the chromatic scale into a row. This "basic" row is then used to create permutations, which are different arrangements of the row's elements. The row can be used to form a set of intervals, or a composer may create the row from a specific sequence of intervals. A row that includes all intervals in their upward direction once is called an all-interval row. In addition to permutations, the basic row may generate other sets of notes, which are used to form new rows. These are called derived sets.
Some tonal chord progressions use all 12 notes, allowing composers to create pitch rows with strong tonal suggestions. Even tonal music can be written using the twelve-tone technique. Most tone rows include subsets that suggest a central pitch. A composer can emphasize or avoid these subsets to create music centered on one or more pitches within the row.
To serialize other musical elements, a system must be created to quantify an identifiable feature (called "parametrization"). For example, if duration is serialized, a set of specific durations must be defined. If tone color (timbre) is serialized, a set of distinct tone colors must be identified.
The selected sets, their permutations, and derived sets form the composer's basic materials.
Composition using twelve-tone serial methods focuses on the full collection of 12 chromatic notes, called an aggregate. (Sets with more or fewer pitches, or other elements, may be treated similarly.) One principle in some serial compositions is that no element of the aggregate should be reused in the same musical line until all other elements have been used, and each element must appear only in its designated position within the series. However, since most serial compositions include multiple series lines played at the same time and repeat some pitches, this principle is more of a general idea than a strict rule.
A series can be divided into subsets. The parts of the aggregate not included in a subset are called its complement. A subset is self-complementing if it contains half of the set, and its complement is also a rearrangement of the original subset. This is most common with hexachords, which are six-note sections of a tone row. A hexachord that is self-complementing for a specific arrangement is called prime combinatorial. A hexachord that is self-complementing for all standard transformations—inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion—is called all-combinatorial.