Serialism

Serialism organizes musical material — pitch, and potentially rhythm, dynamics, or timbre — into an ordered series that governs a composition’s structure, rather than relying on traditional tonal harmony. Arnold Schoenberg introduced its founding form, twelve-tone technique, in the 1920s: a fixed row using all twelve chromatic pitches, related only to one another, providing melodic and harmonic unity without a tonal center. Anton Webern and Alban Berg extended the method within Schoenberg’s Second Viennese School, and it became foundational to postwar composers including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luigi Nono, who extended it toward total serialism.