SERIALISM. The very name has come to stand for a musical bugaboo. Treated interchangeably with "dodecaphony" or the "twelve-tone technique", serialism refers to a style of twentieth-century composition that is notoriously standoffish and difficult to get into. The starting point for the style goes something like this: Tonality — the system of harmonic organization in most Western music from the 1600s on* — by emphasizing one note over and above all of the others. One way to get away from tonality, then, is to prevent any one note from being super emphasized by coming up with a system to make sure that all twelve notes are played roughly the same number of times. The key mechanism to this is the "twelve-tone row", a specific ordering of all twelve pitches in the Western musical system that can be transposed, flipped upside down, and played backwards in any combination. This results in music that lacks a tonal center, music that does not operate along the same tropes of tension and release, expectation and fulfillment as other Western music; it is obeying a different set of rules.