Abstract
In this tutorial we want to think about dealing creatively with a given musical system. There are many such systems—the traditional Western tonal system is one of them, and other cultures have their own systems, such as Indian Raga with its mela scales, or the traditional Korean musics like Pansori, Pungmul, Sanjo, Nongak, etc. with pentatonic scales. In what follows, we want to investigate a system that is an ideal candidate for such a reflection: the serial composition technique. It is an ideal candidate for our tutorial because it has been invented from scratch; it has no dark and complex historical roots and can be viewed as an experiment in musical composition systems. Moreover, the serial system is particularly simple and explicit. Its rules are clear, and it is operated more like a game than a deep musical thought. It has inspired musical composition during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century but has also paralyzed essential aspects of music, such as new directions in harmony or generalized tonality. Serialism was invented in pitch dimension under the title of dodecaphonic composition technique by Arnold Schoenberg around 1921 and realized in his first dodecaphonic composition, the Waltz for Piano, op. 23, No. 5. Later, the dodecaphonic idea was extended to all other parameters—duration, loudness, and attack—and then called serialism.
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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Mazzola, G., Park, J., Thalmann, F. (2011). Creative Aspects of Musical Systems: The Case of Serialism. In: Musical Creativity. Computational Music Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24517-6_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24517-6_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24516-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24517-6
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