Today we continue our journey into the world of Schoenberg and his disciples with serial music. The term “serial music” is often misused as a synonym for “Twelve-tone music “or” atonal music “. In fact this term appeared with Schoenberg, Berg and Webern in the descriptions of works composed after 1920 which were making use of twelve-tone rows, but it was mostly used after the Second World War.

This week, let us focus on the break-up of tonality, initiated in the late nineteenth century and clearly confirmed during the early twentieth century. With several articles about atonal, dodecaphonic music and serial music I want to make a few preliminary remarks before discovering the universe of a key figure in the postwar music world: Pierre Boulez.

In the previous parts of our little story of musical notation we have mainly been focusing on note pitches. But what about the evolution of rhythmic notation?

In the second part of the little story of musical notation, we have seen appear neumes and have discovered that musical notation at this time corresponded more to an aide-mémoire than to a vector of propagation. In the XIth century, a new fact has considerably enrich musical writing: in order to make their work easier, some scribes used to first draw a light line on their support: it was the beginnings of the staff.

During the first episode of this little story of musical notation, we were mainly focused on Greeks. Following this tradition, the western medieval musical notation was first alphabetic. Octaves were labeled in uppercase and lowercase letters: The uppercase letter (A) indicated the first octave, the lowercase letter (a) the second one, the doubled lowercase letter [...]

For several thousand years, music was mostly handed down verbally without leaving a written trace. Regardless, since the origin of writing, it is possible to find some localized attempts of musical notations. A Babylonian tablet dated from the 16th century BC attests these attempts and lets us see a musical notation based on writing (alphabetic letters and grammatical accents).