in the middle of the 20th century many composers wrote music that was completely incomprehensible to the general public why a more interestingly how well on the classical nerd and today we're talking about serialism [Applause] to understand serialism one must first understand its immediate predecessors in the form of the second viennese school of arnold schoenberg Alban Berg and Anton von Webern Schoenberg who talked the other two believed that the ever increasing ambiguity of western music was a precipitous slide towards a complete and total lack of key so he became one of the first composers to write freely atonal music however he soon came to realize that it was actually really really really difficult to write freely atonal music because our brains are capable of perceiving tonal relationships in the most atonal of pieces and so he thought that there needed to be a fundamental guiding principle behind atonal music much as Keys had become the guiding principle for tonal music it was something through which to orient yourself if you're trying to not just listen to it but write it in the first place out of this came the twelve-tone technique where the composer would choose which order every single note of the chromatic scale came in in something called a tone row composers were limited because you could only drive forward through the row and any iteration of it the idea is that composers would use these rows in series and construct chords from them but they would always be heard in succession ie right-to-left and that would mean that every note is used equally and no one note gets one share of the glory and thus no note was heard as the tonic you could hear no tonal motion in a twelve tone piece because well if every note was played the same you really could never tell which was supposed to be home and which was supposed to be away from home in the twelve-tone technique composers were a little bit stymied in which note they could choose next it was all based around the row and a lot of your composition of the road depended on what note you hadn't used yet but they were very very adept at manipulating the tone row itself and using the tone row as a building block not just in its form but also three other forms inversion retrograde and retrograde inversion inversion is probably the most complex of any of this and it involves something called intervallic equivalency which states that an interval going up is the same as an interval going down shorn from a tonal context a major third going up is going to do the same thing as a major third going down see going up to e is going to be the same as C going to a flat so when you invert a row all you're doing is saying that every interval that's going up is now an interval that's going down the notes themselves are different then if you run it in retrograde you get retrograde inversion and then obviously retrograde is just you run the initial row backwards the initial row in this is called the prime but just by using two simple techniques combined with the original you can have four unique tone rows that are based off of one single row idea with these four rows which is really just the same row at a composers disposal actually going in and analyzing a 12 tone piece is one of the most fun musical challenges you can undertake but if looking at the row is the equivalent of the big picture to get really into the meaty details of which intervals are used and which intervals are grouped together within the row itself you have to use something called set theory which is a term borrowed from mathematics but don't worry in this context it basically just amounts to counting let's take the first three notes of the row D E flat and a flat I chose these as an example because they constitute something called the Viennese try chord which is a collection of three notes that when sounded together is quite dissonant it was favored by Viennese composers because of this spiky dissonance to use set theory you have to group the twelve notes row usually into either four groups of three or three groups of four it really works out that way and you can understand the similarities in the interval qualities within the row itself and how the end might relate to the beginning and vice-versa so if you look at this row D is exactly zero half steps away from D so we start with a zero don't ask me why we do this it's just something that's done then a flat is one half step away from D so that's a one and then the a flat is six half steps away from D which is a six there are many other principles to actually grouping these together with set theory but suffice it to say that this is another way to look at these groups collectively this set is a zero one six and any other group of notes that contains both a minor second and a tritone away from the initial starting note is going to be a zero one six set you can apply this to really any set you can actually apply this to even tonal music even though it really doesn't make sense in that context and again I want to make it clear that analyzing music through set theory is a whole video series unto itself it's not really something that should be covered in a video that goes deep into serialism so I'm gonna leave it at that for now it is important however to have that background information so we get to know serialism a little bit more broadly now let's take a look at some of the cultural context behind what this movement actually was about serial techniques were an outgrowth not of the entire second viennese school but rather just of Anton von verbum who wrote some of the shortest and most point allistic abstract pieces of music ever committed to paper because he took Schoenberg theories to heart and applied them and developed them with great rigor he was shot and killed at the end of World War two by a trigger-happy American soldier who was looking for one of Abraham's relatives who was active on the black market with the fractured blocks of east and west in defining the post-war world Western composers latched on to Weber and there are several important reasons why the first of which was that the Soviets were artistically very conservative Stalin pushed an artistic agenda he called Soviet realism which stated that all music had to be for the masses and understandable which basically meant that it had to be understandable to him and his tastes were not on the avant-garde if he or any of his top cronies didn't like it they'd call it formalist and they'd punish the artists Shostakovich rightfully feared for his life during this period because of the censorship during the Stalin era Russian music had to be diatonic it had to be Russian patriotic and it had to be basically Communist Party propaganda and many composers were happy to oblige because it meant that they were going to survive to see another year it wasn't just a step back from the kinds of musical advancements in the West before the Russian Revolution but it actually was a step back from Russian music before the Stalin era Lenin was actually quite fond of avant-garde music that pushed the envelope as long as it expressed something about the proletariat the second is that if Abrams early death was something of a lost hope many composers who were absolutely thrilled by the massive upheaval in western music promised by the twelve-tone technique and its variations as developed by Weber Solvay burn as akin to some kind of profit though Schoenberg invented the principle it was a vey burn who refined it and perfected it much as in the so called first Viennese School Hyden invented all the forms but it was Mozart who went on to refine and perfect those forms expanding the twelve-tone technique to other areas of music was something he was only beginning to do and many other composers felt like they needed to take up that mantle they needed to pick up the torch third romanticism was dead the carnage of World War one very nearly killed it but it was World War two and the development of atomic weapons that signaled to the entire world and thus to artists that we were living in different times qualitatively different times that required a different outlook on life with the death of her cloud Strauss in late 1949 that was the last nail in the coffin for Romanticism the post-war composers who took after they burn began to apply the principles of ordered sets to musical values other than pitch ordered rose and set theory began to crop up in the fields of orchestration and of rhythm and of tempo and really every single musical parameter you can think of Olivia Messiah was amongst the first to do this when he did so with rhythmic values but soon you began to see a total takeover of using ordered sets in these sorts of ways because all of the values were determined by predetermined series using these became collectively known as serialism ie using Series in the 1950s pierre boulez began writing music that he called total serialism where every single aspect of the music was determined before any note was written down as a function of a pre composed series all the work was done before any pin was set to paper and then the piece basically wrote itself from that point on from there on out Velez who was a staunch si realist enough to the point that he actually organized clacks tubu Stravinsky pieces that weren't serialized enough realize that you know maybe this whole total surrealism thing is a bit you know limiting you think the lens could have chosen any number of wildly differing series and the resulting piece wouldn't have been that aesthetically dissimilar from what did result later in life but less would even go as far as to say that maybe writing twelve-tone Rose wasn't necessary at all you can get away with an eleven note row or a thirteen note row which would mean skipping a note or repeating one absolutely unthinkable to the younger Beulah's serialism was the principal in part due to the outsized influence of the major figures who were also not necessarily the nicest people Blaz even objected to the concept of octave doubling and orchestration all terms seeing it as a violation of see realist philosophy notwithstanding the fact that octave doubling had been used by composers not to just add another line which would have been parallel octaves but rather just to add a fresh color a fresh sound or to reinforce a particular line in an atonal quagmire of an orchestra piece oftentimes composers of the second vini school would write an H which stood for help Chima which told the players which voice was the most important if he was octave doubling it makes that stand out a little easier and makes the conductor being able to follow along the score a little bit easier and makes the listener able to hear it a little bit easier and be less was not a fan of this partially because he had one of the greatest ears of all time and he was thus a phenomenal conductor I said that weird phenomenal but you got to give him credit and that he held himself to the same stage as a result there are very few Beulah's pieces and he would often tinker with them for the rest of his life they're impeccably orchestrated not just because of his ear but also because he had to find ways around what he and only he saw as a sea realist infraction figures like karl-heinz Stockhausen applied some of these same principles to the world of electronic music where he was one of the founding figures although he was not without controversy himself and Igor Stravinsky in the third and final period of his career decided to embrace serialism although he always made sure he carved out a couple of exceptions for himself so he would always retain that's classic Stravinsky sound all this being said within a decade of world war ii s conclusion serialism and its supporters had taken over a musical academia and all serious musical circles to the point that any composer who was not interested in the system due to its profound limitations was considered a bit of an outcast if non serious composers were known at all to the sea realist mainstream they were either derided as derivative or appealing to a popular style unthinkable the end result as you might imagine is that serialism more or less stalled out with no place to go beyond the total serialism of Beulah's structures which turned out to be a dead end in its own right everything was by definition downhill from there and composers who really wish to have their own language amidst many composers who were writing in the same style had to make exceptions for themselves had to break the rules in some way in order to make themselves known amidst a sea of blossom it ators ironically what had begun and what was encouraged by the West as a backlash against the musical ethos of communism became itself musical communism the most interesting voices of the mid century either embraced serialism halfway as Stravinsky did or the Italian composer Luigi della piccola took things further but in another direction such as the technologically aided compositions of young a seasoned aqus or completely avoided the question altogether like John Cage lont young George of Ligety or Leonard Bernstein who all wrote very different pieces from each other even with Beulah's the only reason he stood out amongst a crowd of sea realists was his afro mentioned mastery of instrumentation and orchestration aided by his great ear there were of course still many exceptions to the hardline see realist fundamentalist school as embodied in blue let's take for instance Milton Babbitt despite writing a paper controversially titled who cares if you listen where he compared academic composers to research scientists and thought that they should be funded much in the same way for their research he still went up to bat for his students who continued to write tonal music which was unheard of in that era you got to understand that this was a time when students were told that if they were lucky they might be able to get away with writing a major third every now and again now I'm serious that was actually told to students Babbitt was far removed from the tonal world in fact he was just about a serial estatic OTT but he understood on some level that serialism needn't be the only way forward something that folks like Beulah's just didn't get but the 1970s the backlash was really kicking into high gear and then and in the decades to come minimalist composers would cluster themselves around writing long and relentlessly tonal music making sure that their musical processes were actually audible as opposed to the serial lists whose musical processes might be very interesting and very difficult to get your head around mathematically but just weren't audible composers like Annie Hani Nevada alfred Sitka Connecticut Eskie and the aforementioned Georgie Ligety all flirted with serialism early in their careers but keen to abandon it to pursue their own unique musical styles even cashed off Pinterest a composer of some of the densest and least understandable string orchestra pieces of all time said that music history needed to go back to Mahler and restart from there the implication is that something along the way had soured in the fridge if you know what I mean nowadays should be hard-pressed to find a serialized composer as minimalism took over and then post minimalism and now new complexity and now new simplicity it's really fractured the musical world since its downfall but it's also changed the modern history of music in profound ways and we're still not entirely sure of its effects they began a trend where for several decades the only popular modern classical music relegated to the film score the film score became the last bastion of a neo-romanticism that is still embodied in characters like John Williams and Danny Elfman again I want to make this clear it's not the principle itself which is actually really fascinating and applies math to music in profound ways it's the fact that there were so many composers who were dead set on making it absolutely 100% the only way forward for anyone else and they very nearly killed classical music as we know it it is indelibly linked to a time of music history where the reach of composers vastly diminished and orchestras stopped playing so many new pieces in favor of rehashing old favorites because the new pieces were often widely reviled and there were reviled because they didn't understand the seria lists and where they were coming from the seria lists had gotten so into the myriad complexities of their own system that they forgot that there is an audience out there who was at least expecting something interesting even if it's not something that they actually enjoyed instead they heard a lot of things that sounded very similar and stuff that didn't sound really good at all or even remotely interesting to their ears the difficult position of classical music standing in the modern cultural zeitgeist can in part be blamed on this intentional avoidance of accessibility it's not that the works were inaccessible it was rather that the inaccessibility was prized in the name of moving things around and creating interesting patterns and mathematical constructs within the score there was less emphasis on ex passivity as a result it was all about how interesting you could make the patterns within the notated music itself it was more about the notation than actually being able to get performed not only were these pieces not really wanted to buy the larger classical music audience but they were also not really things that could necessarily be played by every orchestra a lot of composers realize that in order to really push the envelope they needed to write music that was extremely difficult on top of not really being stuff that people wanted to hear it is without a doubt a fascinating system and elements of it still are around in modern scores but I think it is a good thing for music history that the grip of the serial ists on musical academics ISM has long since been broken we're just now sort of dealing with the aftermath [Music] [Applause]