Sprechstimme: German for "speaking voice." Sprechstimme is the use of the voice in a heightened style of recitation that is midway between speaking and singing. In general, it calls for only the approximate reproduction of pitches and in any case avoids the sustaining of any pitch, thus it is often notated with x's as note heads, placed on a staff so as to indicate a general contour. The stems and flags of the notes are used in the conventional way to indicate rhythm and duration.
Tonality: See list of musical terms for Haydn.
Atonality: The absence of a central tonic pitch and diatonic harmonies functionally relating to it. The composer attempts to weaken or suppress the conventions of tonality in order to explore new and unconventional approaches to organizing sounds. At times the word has been used to describe the "twelve-tone" compositions of Schoenberg and his school, which seek to use the entire chromatic scale in a way that gives equal weight to every note rather than identifiying one of them as a tonic or tonal center. However, it is better to think of such music as perpetually modulating rather than as lacking key.
Serialism: The system of post-tonal musical organization
inaugurated by Arnold Schoenberg in the early 1920s. For each
musical work, the composer adopts a particular series or tone
row, which is a selective ordering of the twelve pitches of the
chromatic scale. That series serves as the basic pitch resource
throughout the work, in effect replacing the harmonic and key
relationships that are the basic resources of tonal works. More
recent composers have experimented with serializing other features
of music, such as rhythms and dynamics.