Serialism

In music, serialism is a method or technique of composition that uses a series of values to manipulate different musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though some of his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as a form of post-tonal thinking. Twelve-tone technique orders the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, forming a row or series and providing a unifying basis for a composition's melody, harmony, structural progressions, and variations. Other types of serialism also work with sets, collections of objects, but not necessarily with fixed-order series, and extend the technique to other musical dimensions (often called "parameters"), such as duration, dynamics, and timbre. The idea of serialism is also applied in various ways in the visual arts, design, and architecture (Bandur 2001, 5, 12, 74; Gerstner 1964, passim), and the musical concept has also been adopted in literature (Collot 2008, 81; Leray 2008, 217–19; Waelti-Walters 1992, 37, 64, 81, 95).

An Experiment with Time

An Experiment with Time is a book by the British aeronautical engineer J. W. Dunne (1875–1949) on the subjects of precognitive dreams and the nature of time. First published in March 1927, it was very widely read, and his ideas were promoted by several other authors, in particular by J. B. Priestley. He published three sequels; The Serial Universe, The New Immortality, and Nothing Dies.

Contents

Appendix to the third edition:

Index

Description

Overview

The first part of the book describes many precognitive dreams, most of which Dunne himself had experienced.

The second part of the book sets out a theory to try and explain them. This is, simply put, that all moments in time are present together. Anyone could see their own birth, life and death in the same instant, were it not for the human consciousness, which focuses attention on a "now" which travels through time at a fixed rate.