Serial composition — rows, retrograde, inversion
Serial (twelve-tone) technique orders the 12 semitones into a row and forbids repeating any note "until he has passed through all the other notes of his 'row'"; it evolved in the 20th century "as the final stage of tonality" (Schoenberg, then Webern) and was later extended to rhythm, dynamics and other parameters (source: s-tw046-serial-composition). It is the opposite of scales-and-modes: no home note, every pitch weighted equally.
The four row forms, in tracker terms#
| form | what you do to the phrase | offsets, for a fragment 0 4 7 11 |
|---|---|---|
| prime (P) | the row as written | 0 4 7 11 |
| retrograde (R) | play the rows backwards ("like a mirror image") | 11 7 4 0 |
| inversion (I) | every interval that went up goes down by the same amount | 0 -4 -7 -11 = 0 8 5 1 inside one octave |
| retrograde inversion (RI) | the inversion, backwards | 1 5 8 0 |
Each form can start on any of the 12 notes, so one row yields 48 versions (source: s-tw046-serial-composition). The offsets in the third column are derived from the definitions; the source describes the operations in words. In a tracker, retrograde is a reversed copy of the block, inversion is negating every step from the first note, and transposition is the usual "shift every note by the same amount" of semitone-math.
Why anyone would#
- Unity: with no tonal centre, "the row is the thing that is constant throughout"; a serial piece develops one row for its whole length, like a fugue or a theme and variations (source: s-tw046-serial-composition).
- Even in tonal chip music the operations are a variation kit: retrograde a riff for the answer phrase, invert a bass line for the B section, rotate drum sounds — see melody-writing and rhythm-and-groove.
- Serial control of parameters was the method of the first electronic-music studios (Stockhausen, Pousseur, Koenig and others, mostly with sine waves "tuned to pitch systems that were not possible on conventional instruments"), and Webern's argument that dissonance is as natural as consonance because both live in the harmonic series helped microtones seem less strange (source: s-tw046-serial-composition).
Serial percussion#
The article's one concrete tracker idea: "a percussion track with alternating sounds, where one particular sound never repeats until all the other sounds have sounded in order" — a row of drum samples instead of pitches (source: s-tw046-serial-composition).
Caveats#
shawnm — Shawn of NOISE, interviewed in TraxWeekly #41 (source: s-tw041-interview-shawnm) — had "never seen any tracked music that uses serial technique", is "not a very big fan of serial music", and uses such systems only as influences, disliking "being forced to use ANY sort of rules"; Varèse and Zappa rejected serialism as too restricting (source: s-tw046-serial-composition).
Related#
scales-and-modes · semitone-math · melody-writing · rhythm-and-groove · arrangement · shawnm