Serialism works as follows:
Arnold Schoenberg took the 12 pitches (C-C#-D-D#-E-F-F#-G-G#-A-A#-B) and arranged them into a series, which he called a row. The row serves as the melodic guide for the piece, with the basic being that no note can be repeated until the entire row has been played.
Most of the time there were no pleasing harmonies such as octaves or thirds. It actually remained a central style for composers from the end of WWII to the 1970’s.
My question is, are there any works/songs.compositions that might be familiar or even famous to the general public using this system?
This is likely to get more answers in Cafe Society. Moved.
Gfactor, GQ Moderator
Most likely not. It would be awesome if someone could pull it off but I can’t imagine any resulting music would sound melodically or harmonically pleasing enough to become a widely popular song.
As someone who studied twelve-tone composition for a semester, I can say with some sureness that there are not. My dad used to refer to it as “gleep-glop” music, and that’s about how most fans of academic music reacted to it for all those decades. The point of serialism was to destroy tonality, and not many in the popular music world are particularly interested in that goal.
Serialism was a dead end, musically, but was popular among many composers because once you figured out your row, composition required much less thought than other styles. Many of the composers hung on to a sort of bullshit superiority about pursuing a musical direction that was not popular with “the masses”. Then Minimalism arose in the 1960s and 70s and became wildly popular outside of the conservatory. Kinda killed off the whole thing, thank god.
I’m imagining Rogers & Hammerstein re-writing “Do-Re-Mi” in 12-tone serialism. :eek:
Nitpick - some composers.
Not true in the slightest (whatever Boulez might have said in the past). Serialism arose as a product of atonality, providing a a structural control replacing that lost with the disappearance of key structures.
Who shot who in the what now? 
I picked up some Schoenberg the other day out of curiosity-- from his early to his late stuff. Wow. As in, I can’t listen to it for very long. Interesting to see how totally trained our expectations and sensibilities are with music.
A whole page of serialist works for your listening (dis)pleasure.