Integral Serialism

Integral serialism, also called total serialism, is a compositional method developed in post-war Europe in which the serial ordering applied by the twelve-tone technique to pitch is extended to every parameter of the music: duration, dynamics, timbre and articulation are each governed by predetermined numerical series. The result is music of extreme organisation and discontinuity, in which no element is left to intuition or convention. Formulated around 1949-1952 by the young composers gathered at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, *Pierre Boulez*, *Karlheinz Stockhausen*, *Luigi Nono* and *Bruno Maderna*, it dominated the European avant-garde for a decade and provoked the reactions from which much later modernism grew.