ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author continues and completes study of serialism, and focuses on some representative examples of serial techniques after 1945. He examines Stravinsky’s use of serial methods in his late compositions and explains some of the serial techniques used by French composer Pierre Boulez and by American composer Milton Babbitt. The procedure known as rotation, found in a majority of Stravinsky’s serial works, is the most characteristic element in the composer’s approach to serial composition. Pierre Boulez represents, perhaps better than any other composer of his time, the compositional attitudes and approaches characteristic of the young post-World War II generation in Western Europe (a group which also includes composers such as Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, and Henri Pousseur, among others). The music Babbitt refers to as “advanced” contemporary music, on the other hand, is truly new music.
