20th CENTURY - Serial

SERIAL composition is a technique developed by Arnold Schoenberg. One of his aims was to break away from the long-established system of TONALITY (with KEY SIGNATURES, CADENCES etc.). To do this, he based his compositions on TONE ROWS, consisting of the 12 notes of the CHROMATIC SCALE arranged in a particular order. Each note appears only once in the TONE ROW. The TONE ROW is then manipulated to produce the composition.

Ways of manipulating this basic musical material (the TONE ROW) included:

RETROGRADE: the TONE ROW played backwards

INVERSION: A mirror image of the TONE ROW (if you played it with the TONE ROW itself, it would create CONTRARY MOTION

These two techniques could be combined to create a RETROGRADE INVERSION.

Because they are based on musical material in which each note is given equal importance, as opposed to traditional tonal music in which some notes (eg. the key note) are more important than others, SERIAL compositions often sound very DISSONANT and are ATONAL. This depends on the TONE ROW, though - much of Berg's Violin Concerto, a  SERIAL composition sounds TONAL (see track one in the playlist).

Key composers initially were Schoenberg himself and Berg and Webern, although many Twentieth Century composers used SERIAL techniques to a greater or lesser extent in their music.