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1.  Serialism: Creating a tone Row

Read the following:

Serialism: three facts

1.      The Serialist way of composing deliberately contradicts the traditional music style where melodies and accompaniments are built on scales and chosen chords.

2.      Serialist musicians would use all the black and white notes from C to the next B. Traditional music has a key centre built on scales has some notes used more often than others and some chords used more than others. For example the note C is used the most often in most tunes that use the notes of C major. It is the key centre.

3.      Serialist music seeks to avoid a sense of key centre. The best way to do this is to avoid repeating notes. So, all the notes have to be used before any are repeated. You will need to sort out the order in which the notes are used before you start composing.  This is called the TONE ROW.

EXAMPLE 1

Here are all the notes from C to the next B. There are 12 notes altogether.

A chromatic scale

Exercise 1

Copy example 1. Be very careful to write in the sharps and flats correctly to the left of each note and so that the centre of the sign in exactly opposite the note head.

 Read the following:

Example 2 below shows the 12 notes on a keyboard, which can be used to play the above tone row

Example 2

 

Exercise 2

Find and play all the notes found in example 1 on a keyboard. The keyboard in example 2 shows all the notes including the black as well as white notes

Read the following:

Examples 3a and 3b below shows a tone row. The notes in example 1 have been shuffled into a new order. Notice also that C (or the original note 1 has been moved to a higher C. This is not essential but movements of any of the notes up or down to the same named note is also allowed in this style.

Now all that is needed is to re-number the shuffled notes so that they can more to help when using them in this order in the composition.

EXAMPLE 3a

EXAMPLE 3b:

A tone row

Read the following.

When the order of the notes has been decided then attention should be turned to the time signature and the rhythm. Serialist compositions often have the same rhythm, dynamics and articulation used in traditional music and we will keep the time signatures simple at this stage.

Exercise 3

Write your own tone row: Write all the notes in example 1 but shuffle them into a different order. First write down the numbers under the stave in your new order. All the notes should be used but only once. You should then have your own tone row from which you can begin to compose.

 

Tone Row 1 (numbers and notes  -order chosen from example 1)

  

         __    __     __      __      __     __     __      __       __     __     __  

Tone row 1 (finished numbering)