Serialism- music not murder (:

     Serialism music pretty much started with Arnold Schoenberg in 1921, and his twelve tone technique. It was extremely influential in post-war music. It's kinda like all twelve of the notes on the chromatic scale are only related with one another, and the music is NOT on key. The technique was pretty influential to composers in the mid-twentieth century. The music is definitely different from any music at or before its time. A lot of people were really against it, simply because they were not at all used to it.
     Arnold Schoenberg (September 13, 1874-July 13, 1951),  was first an Austrian composer, then later an American composer. the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea. He was born into a middle class Jewish family. He moved to the U.S in 1934. He was a painter, a tescher, a composer, and a music theorist. Since he was Jewish he had to flee several times before coming to America. Schoenberg experienced triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number 13, which more than likely triggered his death. On Friday, July 13, 1951 Schoenberg laid in bed all day. Later that night he died at 11:45 p.m. Ironically enough it was 76, 7+6=13.


 (Schoenberg)


Although to the ear it may sound simple like anyone can play, but the notes are extremely complicated. For example:

 


     "So serial thinking is something that's come into our consciousness and will be there forever: it's relativity and nothing else. It just says: Use all the components of any given number of elements, don't leave out individual elements, use them all with equal importance and try to find an equidistant scale so that certain steps are no larger than others. It's a spiritual and democratic attitude toward the world. The stars are organized in a serial way. Whenever you look at a certain star sign you find a limited number of elements with different intervals. If we more thoroughly studied the distances and proportions of the stars we'd probably find certain relationships of multiples based on some logarithmic scale or whatever the scale may be."
                                                                                                                   -Karlheinz Stockhausen