Does anyone know if the Modernist tradition in Western art music terminated in integral serialism or has been?
First off I would recommend revising the idea of history as single linear thread. Ideas usually don’t just ‘terminate’, but are varied and transformed. Most artistic ideas throughout history have many widespread influences, and many widespread consequences. Also, History is usually not as teleological as we’d like to think, as historians, we tend to impose a convenient narrative that explains what’s going on. Integral serialism (also called total serialism) is one notion of serialism taken to it’s logical extreme, so in this sense, once you’ve serialized every element of music in a piece, there’s nothing left to do. But there were other ways in which composers used serialism, some extended the technique to microtonal music, there’s a school of French spectralists that write 24-tone serial music. There are plenty of composers who thought a single tone row in a piece was not enough. Keep in mind Serialism was not the only modernist tradition. Think about accounting for Stravinsky, the ne
