Serial Music Recommendations?

"Serial Music" is still fairly broad. 12-tone versus non-12 etc... hyper-romantic...

Suggest you start not with the works that are most slavishly observant of tone-row theory and look to those considered the zenith of the art. Start with Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, for example.

A "standard reference" recording like Boulez' Ensemble Intercontemporain would be a good choice.

The Orpheus recording has long been a personal favorite, and it includes the Chamber Symphonies.

The Emerson Quartet recording of the Webern works is very good... you should eventually also own their recording of the Bartok Quartets. While not purely serial, they employ serial techniques along with Bartok's penchant for deriving modernity from regional folk song. Their recording of the 3rd is rock and roll Bartok-style.

Berg's Wozzeck, which I don't care for personally, is perhaps the seminal example of the techniques on the dramatic stage.

I agree that serialism is hard to pin down --- how strict do you want to be? I think the Boulez stuff is unlistenable. I like the earlier stuff when things were not as constrained, like the Berg violin concerto. Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire has lots of weird things going on in case you get bored. I love Webern's opus 10, because it's so concise (some pieces are 30 seconds long), and is an extreme distillation of the hyper Romantic pieces that came before him. I also love Stravinsky's Agon, which sets modernism against old French court dance rhythms. Those pieces are nice because they provide a kind of bridge to what came before. Then there're tone rows hidden inside more conventional music. Bernstein's Aria and Baccarolle songs have a few examples. There are movie soundtracks which use tone rows for particular effects, too --- notably creepy scenes, if that gives you an idea of what that technique means to lots of people. Britten used a tone row in Prince of the Pagodas to highlight the mechanical, robotic character of one of the princes. --Andre

Good thoughts, Andre. Even the theme to the old radio drama "The Whistler" was a riff on a tone row.

Well of course there's a problem with terminology. Schoenberg called his tone-row based method simply "the method of composing with twelve tones." The term "serialism" actually originated with Darmstadt-school "total serialists" who didn't use tone rows necessarily, but often used more rigorous techniques that were unique to individual pieces. Generally, when Americans say "serialism", they tend to refer to music composed with Schoenberg's tone-row method, so I'll assume this is what the OP is looking for. If you want to avoid confusion altogether, you can also use the term "dodecaphonic music." These are recommendations from my own humble music collection, offered with no pretense of totality: I tend to think that Schoenberg's properly dodecaphonic pieces are less interesting than the "free-atonal" pieces of his pre-WW1 era, but in any case he never stopped being an excellent composeer who could write idiomatically for any instrumental combination using any musical syntax, be it common-practice tonality, expressionist extended tonality, free atonality, or serialism. Of his serial pieces, I recommend Variations for Orchestra, String Quartet #4, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Fantasy for Violin and Piano, and Trio for violin, viola, and cello. Of course, all his free atonal pieces from 1908-1920 will reward listening, and his extended-tonality Kammersymphonies #1 and #2- written on the upward and downward cusps of his 'emancipation of dissonance' respectively- are among my favorite pieces of 20th century music of any genre. There is a broad movement throughout the course of Webern's ouevre, but IMO he never really had the versatility to be a great composer like Schoenberg. He adopts Schoengerg's serial technique somewhere around op. 12 or op. 13., and his first works with the techniques are a series of songs. I'll admit I've never really investigated these pieces too thoroughly, but supposedly he was an excellent setter of texts. Of the instrumental and choral pieces of his serial output, I recommend the String trio op. 20, Symphonie. op 21, Das Augenlicht op. 26, String Quartet op. 28, and the first and second cantatas (ops. 29 & 31). Especially in the very last pieces, he rediscovers the sense of broad Romantic tone-painting with which his career began, and which contrasts markedly with the jagged expressionism of his early "miniaturist" pieces and the almost mechanical super-rationalism of pieces like the Quartet op. 22. You'll notice the Piano Variations are absent from my list of recommendations... the popularity of this piece eludes me. In any case, I recommend you buy the Sony Classical box set of all of Webern's opus-numbered works for the low!low!low! price of 24.99. Boulez' music from the 50s and 60s never ceases to astound me. In fact, I only recently discovered that his music from this era is in fact dodecaphonic, which makes sense since there is a "linearity" to it you won't find in contemporaneous compositions from someone like Stockhausen. By all means check out Le Marteau Sans Maître, Pli Selon Pli, and the piano sonatas. The recent stuff I've heard like Anthemes and Repons almost strikes me as ear candyish, and doesn't seem to have the classical, developmental sense of forward motion that made his midcentury work so interesting. I couldn't even pretend to know what compositional techniques he uses these days. Luigi Dallapiccola wrote 12-tone music that was extremely charming and accessible. Check out Due Studi, Parole Di San Paolo, Concerto Per La Notte Di Natale Dell'Anno. I don't know a whole lot about George Perle, but by all means check out his beautiful string quartet #5, Extremely accessible to the serialism noob. George Rochberg has a pretty far-ranging ouevre, very little of it strictly serial, but almost all of it worth checking out. Of the serial music, check out Serenata d'estate and especially Symphony #5. Milton Babbitt has a bad rap for being academic and overly-cereberal, but his music actually isn't that in accessible. Check out his String Quartet #2 and Arie Da Capo.

You weren't misusing the terms, but there is some ambiguity associated with the term "serial", especially since some people mistakenly use it as a catch-all term for atonal music, and others use it strictly to refer to Darmstadt-school composition techniques. And yeah, I'm posting YouTube videos here, but of course the best way to listen to this (as with all classical music) is without distractions, and without futzing around on your computer. As I said, it rewards serious listening. Schoenberg: IMPORTANT NOTICE: No media files are hosted on these forums. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website. We can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. If the video does not play, wait a minute or try again later.       I AGREETIP: to embed Youtube clips, put only the encoded part of the Youtube URL, e.g. eBGIQ7ZuuiU between the tags. LGdcxYYyE9oIMPORTANT NOTICE: No media files are hosted on these forums. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website. We can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. If the video does not play, wait a minute or try again later.       I AGREETIP: to embed Youtube clips, put only the encoded part of the Youtube URL, e.g. eBGIQ7ZuuiU between the tags. u6BzLwHLKisIMPORTANT NOTICE: No media files are hosted on these forums. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website. We can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. If the video does not play, wait a minute or try again later.       I AGREETIP: to embed Youtube clips, put only the encoded part of the Youtube URL, e.g. eBGIQ7ZuuiU between the tags. 8GymJUFFwlI Dallapiccola: IMPORTANT NOTICE: No media files are hosted on these forums. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website. We can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. If the video does not play, wait a minute or try again later.       I AGREETIP: to embed Youtube clips, put only the encoded part of the Youtube URL, e.g. eBGIQ7ZuuiU between the tags. cIBMACgYSWkIMPORTANT NOTICE: No media files are hosted on these forums. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website. We can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. If the video does not play, wait a minute or try again later.       I AGREETIP: to embed Youtube clips, put only the encoded part of the Youtube URL, e.g. eBGIQ7ZuuiU between the tags. TI5eZfHT7KU Webern: IMPORTANT NOTICE: No media files are hosted on these forums. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website. We can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. If the video does not play, wait a minute or try again later.       I AGREETIP: to embed Youtube clips, put only the encoded part of the Youtube URL, e.g. eBGIQ7ZuuiU between the tags. fQmXU-XMCIsIMPORTANT NOTICE: No media files are hosted on these forums. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website. We can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. If the video does not play, wait a minute or try again later.       I AGREETIP: to embed Youtube clips, put only the encoded part of the Youtube URL, e.g. eBGIQ7ZuuiU between the tags. qUQT2uKJoTMIMPORTANT NOTICE: No media files are hosted on these forums. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website. We can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. If the video does not play, wait a minute or try again later.       I AGREETIP: to embed Youtube clips, put only the encoded part of the Youtube URL, e.g. eBGIQ7ZuuiU between the tags. idFJKhOa2p4IMPORTANT NOTICE: No media files are hosted on these forums. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website. We can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. If the video does not play, wait a minute or try again later.       I AGREETIP: to embed Youtube clips, put only the encoded part of the Youtube URL, e.g. eBGIQ7ZuuiU between the tags. IIqHUovf6us Also, I neglected to mention Webern's Variations for Orchestra and Dallapiccola's Quaderno musicale di Annalibera, the latter of which might be an ideal starting place for a serialism noob. Many people would suggest Berg's Violin Converto, even though I never really got around to checking out much Berg myself (I do have the concerto on cassette tape somewhere around here...)

Remember that 12-tone music as such didn't start until relatively late in Schoenberg's career. A lot of atonality had gone under the bridge by then. One of the first bits of 12-tone music to attract is the Berg Concerto, here with Webern conducting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTYAm0BXkxs This squib deliberately fudges the issue of 12-tone vs. Viennese School (Schoenberg/Webern/Berg), but is still pretty hilarious: http://www.uiowa.edu/~somhorn/resour...shumor12T.html Also, although I don't own the score and have no analytical knowledge of the piece, I've found that Christoph von Dohnanyi's recording of the Webern Op 21 Symphony is extremely beautiful.