Serial Music And Serialism

Serial or 12-tone music has proved to be an enduring 20th century style that has generated a wide range of writings. This much-needed work provides the only comprehensive, up-to-date guide to research on serial music, offering an annotated bibliography with nearly 500 citations from books and journals from 1950 to 1995.

Serial music was one of the most important aesthetic movements to emerge in post-war Europe, but its uncompromising music and modernist aesthetic has often been misunderstood. This book focuses on the controversial journal die Reihe, whose major contributors included Stockhausen, Eimert, Pousseur, Dieter Schnebel and G. M. Koenig, and discusses it in connection with many lesser-known sources in German musicology. It traces serialism's debt to the theories of Klee and Mondrian, and its relationship to developments in concrete art, modern poetry and the information aesthetics and semiotics of Max Bense and Umberto Eco. M. J. Grant sketches an aesthetic theory of serialism as experimental music, arguing that serial theory's embrace of both rigorous intellectualism and aleatoric processes is not, as many have suggested, a paradox, but the key to serial thought and to its relevance for contemporary theory.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A clear, non-technical introduction to serialism - a key topic in music studies for both undergraduate and graduate students.

Total serialism as a concept, has progressed beyond the twelve-tone technique of composers Schoenberg and Webern, and since the 1950s it has been constantly developed. Today, it refers to far more than just a technical process for composing, rather it offers one possibility of creatively integrating knowledge on man and nature into works of art. On all levels of artificial, man-made creations - from musical compositions to architectonic designs - it allows properties and dimensions to be systematically organised, with criteria such as mass and proportions playing decisive roles. Markus Bandur (born in 1960) studied science of music, philosophy and history and now teaches at the universities of Freiburg i.Br, Berne and Kassel

Widely recognized as the definitive work in its field ever since its original publication in 1962, Serial Composition and Atonality remains an unsurpassed introduction to the technical features of what is probably the most revolutionary body of work since the beginnings of polyphony. In the analysis of specific compositions there is first and last of all a concern with the musical surface—an attempt to trace connections and distinctions there before offering any deeper-level constructions, and to offer none where their effects are not obvious on more immediate levels of musical experience. In this sixth edition of the book, George Perle employs the new and more consistent terminology for the identification of transpositional levels of twelve-tone sets that he first proposed in Twelve-Tone Tonality (1977).