In
music,
serialism is a method or technique of
composition that uses a series of values to manipulate different
musical elements. Serialism began primarily with
Arnold Schoenberg's
twelve-tone technique, though some of his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as a form of
post-tonal thinking. Twelve-tone technique orders the twelve notes of the
chromatic scale, forming a
row or series and providing a unifying basis for a composition's
melody,
harmony, structural progressions, and
variations. Other types of serialism also work with
sets, collections of objects, but not necessarily with fixed-order series, and extend the technique to other musical dimensions (often called "
parameters"), such as
duration,
dynamics, and
timbre. The idea of serialism is also applied in various ways in the
visual arts,
design, and
architecture (; ), and the musical concept has also been adopted in literature (; ; ).