ABSTRACT
The end of World War II in 1945 was followed by two major developments in music. One of these was the beginnings of electronic music. The other development was the dissemination of the serial technique and the extension of its principles into all facets of musical composition. In classical serial technique, the composer constructs the pitch series before beginning the actual composition. European composers, unaware of Milton Babbitt's work in the United States, developed a different approach to integral serialism. Integral serialism refers to the precompositional control not only of pitch, as in classical serialism, but of other elements of a composition as well. Rhythm, dynamics, articulation, register, row form, and timbre have all been subjected to precompositional ordering. In some cases these orderings are independent of each other, but often the composer attempts to relate all of the musical materials to a single series.
