ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the basics of serialism. In an effort to systematically avoid a pitch center, some twentieth-century composers turned to serialism, a method in which all twelve pitch classes are arranged in a row that serves as the basis for a work of music. Serialism is arguably the closest that twentieth-century composers came to establishing a new common practice. Integral serialism is an attempt to serialize all musical parameters in a work, often using rows from a single matrix. A twelve-tone row is an ordering of the twelve pitch classes with each pc occurring once and only once. Composers often design rows with recurring sets and then exploit those sets musically. Portions of rows can “bunch up” to create chords. Some composers use a single row form for an entire work, but most use the initial row along with any number of transformations of that row.
