Serial Analysis: A Digital Library of Rows in the Repertoire and their Properties, with Applications for Teaching and Research

Abstract

Recent years have seen the emergence of concerted efforts for consolidating and curating digital libraries of musical analyses. This is a welcome development that stands to complement the more established attention to collections of musical resources like scores, recordings, and manuscripts. This paper begins by presenting a new digital library of 12-tone rows used in the repertoire. The list incorporates and extends all previous scholarly and crowd-sourced efforts to provide human- and computer-readable information about the rows and their usage including composer, work, and date. We present this list in both textual and musical notation, and in both ‘fixed’ and editable formats to support the widest possible use and development of this resource across pedagogy and research. Further, we present one initial application in each of those domains. First is a free, public-facing anthology as part of the Open Music Theory Textbook v.2, providing teachers and students with rows presented in terms of properties such as combinatoriality. Second is a substantial study of more novel row properties, using the Discrete Fourier transform to examine distributions of harmonic qualities in the rows, as well as trends by composer and date. Finally, to support replication and extension, we provide the list, anthology, and all the associated processing code used at https://github.com/MarkGotham/Serial_Analyser.