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Well composing doesn't really take much out of me at all. it's something that i like to do. actually, school and other extra-curricular activities take a lot of energy out of me and when i compose it's kind of my time to relax. as for what it gives me in return. not much besides relax-time and my own satisfaction. although maybe later in life, my compositions will be published and used by many others or maybe they won't. i don't know. all i know is that eventually i will be able to use these skills as a composer. maybe i will be using them to compose legendary works, or maybe it will just give me deeper understanding of the technicalities of the pieces i perform in the future. also through composing, i know some of the great people on this forum and have had a great experiences doing challenges or maybe just chatting in the shoutbox.

This really is a tired argument. The answer depends upon how you define serialism. Personally, I like Milton Babbitt's definition: '… a serial relation is one which induces on a collection of objects a strict, simple ordering; that is, an order relation which is irreflexive, nonsymmetric, transitive, and connected over the collection. The term ‘serial’ designates nothing with regard to the number of elements, or the operations—if any—applicable to the elements or the relations among them. A musical work, then, can be described as serial with regard to, say pitch, if the pitch content is most completely and most simply characterized as fulfilling such an ordering with regard to temporal and/or spatial precedence.’ By this definition, you could argue that it isn't really dead. Granted, you're unlikely to find a contemporary composition that strictly follows some sort of serial organisation from beginning to end, but you will find many localised instances of serial ordering within a contemporary composition. I suppose you could argue that Thomas Adès' use of interlocking interval cycles is an example of serial ordering. A simple canon could even be classed as an example of serial ordering. In fact, you could even argue that an isorhythmic motet from the 14th century is a serial composition. Bell changes are a form of serial ordering. Early minimalism is often serial, in the sense that it relies on process. Some spectral music is serial in a sense, as musical decisions are often dictated by the data from a Fast Fourier Transform. In my opinion, serialism has always and will always be used by composers of all styles of music in some form or other, whether they're aware of it or not. It's not dead or alive; it's just a set of tools that have been absorbed into a larger musical lexicon. I suspect that the real question is this: is the musical aesthetic that is most commonly associated with serialism, i.e. music created roughly between 1920-1960 that uses serial organisation as a means of creating a sort of "anti-tonality" that explicitly seeks to avoid any form of tonal reference, dead? For most people, the answer to that is probably yes. Though you can't ignore the fact that there are a lot of composers still around who are about 60+ who still adhere to this aesthetic. They may not be "important" but they certainly exist.

I am all for revisiting old ideas: most of my best compositions have actually been based on ideas I had years earlier. Rather than finishing pieces I abandoned, though, I tend to write completely new pieces based on ideas (melodies or sections or extramusical "programs") that weren't quite ready to be complete pieces when I first came up with them. I guess this means some of my compositions have unusually long "gestation" periods: sometimes I'll come up with a good idea, fight with it for a few days or weeks, then if it isn't working I'll go write other things and ignore it for a few months or years or as long as it takes until one day (maybe under the pressure of a deadline) it becomes glaringly obvious how I can develop it into a complete piece. When I do this, my music tends to be more thematically unified and the piece, as they say, writes itself. Several of my composition professors have told me that, while they struggle to develop their own ideas, they have a very easy time envisioning possibilities for their students' unfinished pieces ("when I look at students' [unfinished] ideas, I often see how the whole piece could unfold," one of them said.) I think it can be the same way when looking at our own older stuff: we have more distance from our old ideas and can look at them more objectively after a few months than we could when we were first struggling to write them down. At least that's how it is for me: it helps to create firm boundaries between an idea's conception and its development, and maybe the more time there is between the two phases (to let my subconsious "digest" the ideas), the better. It's easier to compose variations on a theme you've known your whole life than one you've just heard for the first time. I realize my process is probably somewhat unusual, but if you're ever strapped for ideas, it can't hurt to look at some of your old pieces--you might be surprised by the new ideas that occur to you.

Composers like Brian Ferneyhough, Heinz Holliger, Wolfgang Rihm, Harrison Birtwistle and Hans Werner Henze have been building on the serial tradition during the last 40 years (in quite different ways—sometimes incorporating different influences as well). Traditions don't crystallise, they evolve. You can't claim Beethoven abandoned sonata form when he got rid of the repeats and put the second theme in the mediant and added an extra long coda. Magnus Lindberg composed serial music between about 1975 and 1989, as did Esa-Pekka Salonen. They both became quite renowned during this time. Another well-known (underrated IMO) serial composer who died fairly recently is George Perle. And in Germany & Austria there are plenty of relatively minor composers still carrying on: Yörk Holler, Robert HP Platz, Johannes Schöllhorn, JM Staud etc.