#Serialism

The twelve-tone technique is a grand accounting trick by which composers wipe out their debt of tonal habit. It rigidly regulates the pitch hierarchy while paradoxically leading music into a wilderness of “freedom through constraint.” Audiences wander a labyrinth of rules, unable to tell whether they are deciphering code or witnessing a ritual. In the name of Modernism, it carefully slays tradition and displays its bones as objects of contemplation. Performers, meanwhile, often fail to realize they are prisoners of their own composition.