What it is, what to hear first, and what sits next to it.
Serialism is a technique for composition that uses sets to describe musical elements, and allows the manipulation of those sets. Serialism is often, though not universally, held to begin with twelve-tone technique, which uses a set of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale to form a row (a fixed sequence of the 12 tones of the chromatic scale) as the unifying basis for a composition's melody, harmony, structural progressions, and variations. When not used synonymously .