The Development of Serialism

The late 19th century and early 20th century witnessed many significant changes of the appearance of the Global politics and arts. Especially in music, after centuries dominated by tonal music, many composers of the 20th century revolted and decided to find new music styles to break with traditional music style, which marked by the appearances of the impressionism, the expressionism and the serialism. This essay will discuss about serialism and its development during 20th century.
According to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musician (Vol. 23, P.116), Serialism is a musical composing method which was initiated by Arnold Schoenberg and adopted and developed by his students in Second Viennese School such as Edward Steuermann, Erwin Stein, Ernst Krenek, René Leibowitz, and especially Alban Berg and Anton Webern, and other composers of 20th century including Igor Stravinsky, John Cage, Olivier Messiaen, Stockhausen, etc. According to Gerald Abraham, there are two rules of twelve-tone serialism introduced by Schoenberg in 1920s: the order of each tone row has to be maintained during the work; any tone in a series is prohibited repeating until all other eleven tones appeared. In Schoenberg’s attempt to make the equality in music, it was clear that those rules pleased his purpose. Because in a series, every twelve notes of chromatic scale were equal-tempered and completely atonal. On the other hand, some opinions claimed that serialism was an evolution of tonal music. According to George Perle,
“The twelve-tone system is not as insulated from other contemporary musical developments as it is sometimes assumed to be. Essentially, Schoenberg systematized and defined from his own dodecaphonic purposed a pervasive technical feature of ‘modern’ musical practice, the ostinato.”
And Arnold Whittall also stated that ‘Serialism has not replaced tonality, but coexists and interacts with it’
Moreover, some composers of later period who called serialist enriched the

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