Library Concept
Total Serialism
Extending serial ordering beyond pitch to duration, dynamics, and timbre, pioneered by Messiaen, Boulez, and Stockhausen.
Total (or integral) serialism extends serialism’s ordered-series principle beyond pitch to duration, dynamics, register, and articulation. Olivier Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (1949) provided an unordered series across all these parameters at once; Pierre Boulez ordered it into rows for Structures I (1952), while Milton Babbitt worked toward integral serialism independently in the United States from 1947–48. Karlheinz Stockhausen went further still, developing distributive serial processes that avoided recurring rows altogether to eliminate any trace of theme.