The serial music or serialism is a musical movement 20th century. This concept includes the musics whose principle of construction is based on a succession rigorously preestablished and invariable of sounds called series . The reports/ratios of interval suitable for the series remain stable. It was initiated by the Second school of Vienna with Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, which set up in system a certain evolution of the musical language already perceived at Gustav Mahler and other precursors which pushed the diagrams of the tonality until creating an absence of reference mark so much the modulations were numerous.

In reaction to the " diktats" Tonality, this movement thus conceived a new compositionnelle theory likely to supplant the tonal Harmonie, which prevailed since the 18th century. The serial music is only one particular case of the Dodécaphonisme. The dodecaphony consists in using the 12 chromatic sounds, generally according to a principle of enumeration and without repetition. The serial music really does not appear that with Klavierstück V of the opus 23 of Schönberg in 1923; it is a question here of using only one and single continuation of 12 sounds (the series) and of working its developments according to the 4 forms enumerated below.

* in its original form ( Grundgestalt ) also called right form

* in recurrence (the series is taken by the end) also called form retrogresses

* in inversion (all the interval S are imitated moving contrary, i.e. an interval going down becomes ascending and vice versa) also called form mirror

* in recurrence of the inversion called also form mirror of retrograde the

It is the latter process which, progressing on other side of the Rhine, leads little by little to a chromatic language completely delivered of any tonal polarity : the melodies are not subjected any more to the harmonic laws of attraction towards a note or a agreement. The interest of the process comes owing to the fact that the intervals (or rather intervallic parities) are recurring and propose with hearing a specific harmonico-melody color.

Extension of the field of the series

Generalization at the rates/rhythms and the durations then with the stamps and all the parameters of the its, will lead in the middle of the 20th century to a integral serialism (Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, Babbitt…).

See too

• Dodecaphony

• Music
• Western music
• Classical music
• atonal Music

Simple: Serialism