What is Serialism?
'''Serialism''' is a way of composing music using a series of notes in a particular order and using this to build up a whole piece of music. These series and patterns can also be applied to other parts of music (like how loud or soft it is). ==A simple example== To show how serialism works we can take a very simple example. Let us use just five notes from the white notes of a keyboard. We can use the notes A, B, C, D and E. We are going to make a “tune” using all these five notes, but not repeating any until all five have been used (although we are allowed to repeat the note we have just had). For example: we might have D, C, A, A, A, A, B, E. This is what we call our “row” or “series”, although usually one would expect a row of twelve different notes. It is the one we start off with, so we can call it our tone row. We can change the tone row by playing it backwards. This is called retrograde. So we now get E, B, A, A, A, A, C, D. We can also change it by playing it upside down. This means that instead of going up one step we go down one step, or instead of going up two steps we go down two steps etc. If we start on the same note D we now get: D, E, G, G, G, G, F, C. This is called inversion. We can make it go backwards and upside down. So we get: C, F, G, G, G, G, E, D. This is called retrograde inversion. We now have four ways of playing our row: tone row, retrograde, inversion, retrograde inversion. These can now be transposed to create many more options. ==Schoenberg’s twelve-tone series== In 1923 the composer [[Arnold Schoenberg]] (1874-1951) developed what he called the “twelve-tone system”. Instead of using just five notes as in our example, he used [[chromatic|all 12 notes]] in the octave (5 black and 7 white notes on the piano keyboard). Most music we listen to is in a particular key ([[tonality]]). This is called “tonal” music. For example: if we start “Twinkle, twinkle little star” on a C we finish on a C at the end and the piece sounds finished. It is “tonal” (in a particular