The early twentieth century witnessed the most radical rupture in the history of Western music: the abandonment of tonality. Composers who had grown up within the tonal system — which had organized Western music since the 1600s — found themselves unable to continue within its conventions and developed radical alternatives. The results were some of the most challenging and most important music of the century.
THE CRISIS OF TONALITY
Tonality — the system of organizing music around a tonic (home) pitch toward which all other pitches gravitate and from which departure creates tension — had been the structural foundation of Western music since the seventeenth century. By the early twentieth century, a number of composers felt they had reached tonality's limits: the late Romantic harmonic language of Wagner and Strauss had extended tonality so far (with chromatic melodies, remote modulations, and long passages without clear tonal center) that the distinction between tonal and atonal music was becoming unclear.
Arnold Schoenberg, the central figure in this crisis, described his abandonment of tonality as inevitable: "The tonal system was near exhaustion. It was in danger of becoming a mere convention." His early works — the highly chromatic String Quartet No. 1 (1905) and the monodrama "Erwartung" (1909) — represent the transition from late-tonal chromaticism to what Schoenberg called "free atonality" or "pantonal" writing: music in which no single pitch functioned as a permanent center.
SERIALISM: THE SYSTEM THAT REPLACED TONALITY
Schoenberg recognized that free atonality, which depended on constant avoidance of tonal implications, was compositionally difficult to sustain over extended forms. In the early 1920s, he developed the twelve-tone technique (also called dodecaphony or serialism) as a systematic replacement for tonality.
The twelve-tone technique organizes a composition around a "tone row" (also called a "series"): an ordering of all twelve chromatic pitches in a specific sequence chosen by the composer. This row serves as the composition's unifying material: the composer derives all melodic and harmonic content from the row in its four forms (original, retrograde, inversion, retrograde inversion) and twelve transpositions, producing 48 distinct row forms.
The principle is structural, not merely aesthetic: every note in the composition is accountable to the row from which it derives. This accountability provides a kind of coherence that replaces tonality's hierarchical organization. Instead of pitches gravitating toward a tonic, they gravitate toward their position in the row.
Schoenberg's "Piano Suite Op. 25" (1923) is the first fully serial composition. His later works — "Moses und Aron" (the unfinished opera), the "String Quartet No. 4," the "Violin Concerto" — demonstrate the technique applied to large-scale forms.
WEBERN'S RADICAL REFINEMENT
Anton Webern, Schoenberg's student, took serialism to its logical extreme. Where Schoenberg's serial works retained late-Romantic expressive gestures, Webern stripped everything away: his compositions are often extremely short (his complete output fits on three CDs), written in a pointillistic style (individual notes rather than melodic lines), with extreme dynamic contrasts (from pppp to ffff over a few notes) and an almost mathematical symmetry.
Webern's "Symphony Op. 21" (1928) is perhaps the most extreme example: a two-movement work of about 10 minutes in which virtually every structural element (rhythm, dynamics, register, timbre) is subjected to the same kind of systematic ordering as the pitch series. The music is transparent to the point of fragility — a tissue of isolated notes in extreme registers — and yet structurally dense to the point of labyrinthine complexity.
Webern's influence on post-war serialism was enormous. The composers who emerged after 1945 — Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, Berio — took Webern's systematic approach and extended it to apply serial procedures to rhythm, dynamics, timbre, and articulation as well as pitch. This "total serialism" or "integral serialism" produced some of the most intellectually ambitious music ever composed and some of the most perceptually inaccessible.
BERG: THE EXPRESSIONIST COMPROMISE
Alban Berg, the third member of the "Second Viennese School" (Schoenberg, Webern, Berg), developed a more personal relationship to serialism. His works retain more audible connections to tonality than Schoenberg's or Webern's: his tone rows are often constructed to imply tonal references, and he regularly incorporates folk songs, chorale melodies, and tonal passages into otherwise serial compositions.
Berg's opera "Wozzeck" (1925) — technically one of the last pre-serial works — is the most emotionally accessible of the twentieth century's atonal operas and a demonstration that radical harmonic language can coexist with profound human content. The opera's subject (a soldier's descent into madness and murder) finds its expression in the distortion and extremity of the music.
His later opera "Lulu" (completed posthumously) and his "Violin Concerto" (1935) — written on the death of Manon Gropius, daughter of Alma Mahler — are the most emotionally powerful serial compositions in the repertoire. The Violin Concerto is particularly striking: its tone row contains embedded tonal triads and a quotation of a Bach chorale; the serial technique and tonal reference coexist in a music of unusual transparency and grief.
THE RECEPTION AND LEGACY
Serialism and atonality remain the most controversial developments in Western classical music's history. The Frankfurt School's Theodore Adorno saw serialism as music's necessary response to an administered society — music that refused bourgeois comfort and demanded active engagement. The counterargument — that serial music had abandoned the communicative function that made music valuable — is equally compelling.
The post-war total serialist movement (centered at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, where Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, and Berio taught) produced music of extraordinary ambition and corresponding audience inaccessibility. By the 1970s, many composers were moving away from total serialism toward spectralism, minimalism, and other approaches that restored some degree of perceptual accessibility without abandoning the century's harmonic achievements.
The legacy of serialism is complex but significant: it expanded the harmonic vocabulary of Western music definitively, demonstrating that music organized on principles other than tonal hierarchy was possible. It also raised questions about music's communicative function and its relationship to its audience that remain unresolved.