It was an extraordinary invention, really, even if
serial music
is now widely criticized as esthetically convoluted. As a radically different way of cohering musical notes, this was, literally, a new musical language that had to discover its own rules for organizing musical sounds (its own grammar,
so to speak), its own patterns of procedures (syntax), and its own kinds of structures (sentences). In brief,
Arnold Schoenberg
postulated that the composer, working within the...
