In
music, serialism is a technique for composition that uses
sets to describe
musical elements, and allows the
manipulation of those sets. Serialism is often, though not universally, held to begin with
twelve-tone technique, which uses a set of the 12 notes of the
chromatic scale to form a
row (a fixed sequence of the 12 tones of the chromatic scale) as the unifying basis for a composition's
melody,
harmony, structural progressions, and
variations. When not used synonymously, serialism differs from twelve-tone technique in that any number of elements from any musical dimension (called "parameters") may be ordered, such as duration, register, dynamics, or timbre, and/or pitches may be ordered in sets of fewer or more than twelve tones. The term "series" should not be confused with the mathematical definition, which nevertheless comes into conjunction when the
scales involved are projected from numerical
sequences such as the
arithmetic series,
harmonic series (including its
acoustical manifestation as the
overtone series and its inversion, the so-called subharmonic series),
geometric series,
Fibonacci series, or
infinity series.
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