TW #46 — Serial Composition (shawnm / NOISE)

A short introduction to twelve-tone technique plus a 1994 music-history essay on Anton Webern, offered to the scene as "just another compositional technique to take into account". The author is shawnm, the Shawn of NOISE interviewed in #41 (s-tw041-interview-shawnm).

Key claims#

• The rule: a composer "cannot repeat a note, until he has passed through all the other notes of his 'row'"; a row is any ordered sequence of notes, traditionally all 12 of the chromatic scale.
• Row forms: a row need not be played 1 to 12 in order — it can be retrograded (backwards, "like a mirror image"), inverted ("upside down": every interval that went up goes down by the same amount), or retrograde-inverted; each reflection can start on any of the 12 notes, giving 48 forms.
• The method was later extended to rhythm, dynamics and other parameters; rows of more or fewer than 12 notes were tried.
• Purpose, per Webern: with no tonal centre the row is "the thing that is constant throughout"; a good serial piece develops one row over its whole length "just like a fugue, or a theme and variations" — maximum use of one idea.
• Webern's justification for dissonance: consonances and dissonances (even quarter tones) all sit in the harmonic series, so dissonance is as "natural" as consonance.
• History: Schoenberg's twelve-tone idea, Webern's development, and serial technique at the start of electronic music (Stockhausen, Pousseur, Koenig and others used serial control of parameters, mostly with sine waves "tuned to pitch systems that were not possible on conventional instruments"); Varèse and Zappa rejected serialism as too restricting.
• The author's stance: "I have never seen any tracked music that uses serial technique. Maybe someone will want to try it"; he does not like being forced to follow rules and uses systems only as influences.

Practical takeaways#

• Apply it to percussion: "a percussion track with alternating sounds, where one particular sound never repeats until all the other sounds have sounded in order".
• Row operations translate directly to tracker edits: retrograde = reverse the rows of a phrase; inversion = negate every semitone step; transposition = shift the whole block (see serial-composition for the arithmetic).
• If tonal theory (as used by necros and basehead) looks complicated, "take a listen to some music by Webern, Boulez, Stockhausen … and then I think that you'll quickly embrace tonal theory :)".

Notable quotes#

• "Serial composition is a technique of composition that evolved in the 20th century as the final stage of tonality."
• "I don't like the idea of being forced to use ANY sort of rules in music composition."

Relevance#

The wiki's only source on atonal method; useful as a variation toolbox (retrograde, inversion) even for tonal chip music, and as the origin story of electronic music's parameter control.

Pages touched#

serial-composition (new), scales-and-modes, melody-writing, rhythm-and-groove, shawnm.