total serialism

noun

1. (in some music after 1945) the use of serial techniques applied to such elements as rhythm, dynamics, and tone colour, as found in the early works of Stockhausen, Boulez, etc

Example Sentences

Back then, total serialism was the reigning ideology; now it is the cult of extreme sounds, both electronic and instrumental, of which the undisputed leader is the German composer Helmut Lachenmann.

From The New Yorker

From 1957 to 1959, Bennett was a scholarship student with Pierre Boulez in Paris and soaked up the latter's total serialism techniques as well as his infatuation with the German avant garde.

From The Guardian

His methods became the basis of the “total serialism” championed in the 1950s by Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono and other European composers.

From New York Times

In those days the music department occupied the top floor of the university’s journalism building on Broadway, higher learning was all around, and the recently created Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center had taken up residence, overseen by faculty composers with impeccable scholarly reputations: Otto Luening, Vladimir Ussachevsky and, from Princeton, that formidable mandarin of total serialism, Milton Babbitt.

From New York Times