TWENTIETH- - Synapse Music

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INTRODUCTION
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Serialism After 1945
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 subject of Chapter 12. The other development,
the subject of this chapter, was the dissemination of the serial technique and
the extension of its principles into all facets of musical composition.
Although Schoenberg composed his first twelve-tone work in 1921 , seriali sm did not
appeal at once to a large number of composers outside of his immediate circle. But when
World War IT ended, interest in serialism spread rapidly, and the technique was taken up
with enthusiasm by the younger generation of composers as well as by established composers
as diverse as Copland and Stravinsky_ It may be that serialism represented to some
composers a rationality that was welcome after the irrational horrors of the war, and the
fact that Hitler's regime had tried to suppress serial ism certainly did nothing to harm its
postwar reputation. In the United States, considerably less affected by the war, interest in
twelve-tone music was due in part to Schoenberg's (enure from 1936 on as a professor at
the Uni versity of California at Los Angeles.
But many of the new adherents to serialism felt that Schoenberg had not taken the
technique far enough. Instead of restricting serialism to the domain of pitch class, these
composers felt that other aspects of composition should also be controlled by some kind
of precompositionai plan. This approach has been given various labels, among them
"total serialization," "total control," "generalized serialism," and the one we wi 11 use,
integral serialism.