simon silverdollar said:
what's 12-tone composition?
Enormous topic, but I'll give it a try.
In the first decades of the 20th century composer Arnold Schoenberg was looking for a way out of what many perceived to be something of a dead end in late romantic music and methods of composition, namely, a kind of undifferentiated and (seemingly) totally subjective atonality with too few principles of organization. (This is only one way of characterizing the moment, and is terribly reductive, others will be able to put it better.)
In response, Schoenberg developed a method whereby all of the pitches in the octave could be used to generate the harmonic fabric of a piece without excluding, or favoring, any particular pitch. His method was to generate a row or 'series' of notes made from all 12 tones of the octave and to put them in a sequence *without repeating any of the notes*. This was an attempt to give all of the pitches within the western scale an equal weight or value. The 12-tone row was then used as a basis for generating the harmony of the piece instead, say, of using western scales or previously attested harmonic systems which brought with them their own burden of tradition and harmonic expectations. A kind of methodical modernism if you like, not terribly far from the use of the grid in 20th century painting.
(1) So, according to the method, a composer would literally write out, from left to right on the music staff, a row of 12 pitches, using every note within the octave, without repetition. This was often called the 'prime' row.
(2) Next one writes this row of 12 tones in reverse, literally backwards. This comprises the second 12-tone tone row, otherwise known as the 'retrograde' row of notes.
(3) Then you take the original tone row and 'invert' it, which, in music parlance means that you write the prime row in something like an upside-down fashion, or, in other words, you rewrite the row with the same intervals but each interval is shifted in the oppositie direction on the music staff, i.e., either up or down. Again, this generates yet another sequence of 12 tones, all of which come from one octave, none of which are repeated before the end of the sequence.
(4) Finally, you reverse the order of the 'inverted' row, or, again, you write the 'inverted' row backwards.
Having done this, the composer now has four separate melodic lines, all of which were generated from the twelve available notes of the western scale/octave, virtually none of which depended on the subjective preference of one interval or melody or chord progression or other compositional technique etc etc (which was one of the points of the method, to avoid these).
(Sure, the intervals themselves in the original row were selected by the composer. But the other three followed from this row in a mechanical way. The results were almost always somewhat 'dissonant', and common intervals such as major thirds were usually avoided so as not to imply or hint at western tonal systems.)
The four rows were then used for generating the harmonic material of the piece. This was seen as a way of methodically overcoming a kind of abyss where every composer simply writes whatever atonal music they like, without any method whatsoever.
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Brief notes on the history:
Schoenberg's first 12-tone piece is usually said to have been written in 1921, though I'm not sure about this.
Alban Berg and Anton von Webern were Schoenberg's most famous students, and both went on to become very successful composers. It is worth noting that both employed Schoenberg's method in drastically different ways.
Later composers took this method of serializing the harmonic material ( = generating 'rows') and applied it to all aspects of the piece, including rhythmic material, dynamics, and so on. Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbit are two well-known examples of this, though Boulez did much, much more later (to say nothing of the fact that he is one of the finest conductors and promoters of 'new music' in the classical world since WWII), and Babbit is usually known among more electronically-oriented music fans for his early experiments with computer music (much? all? of which was serial as well).
This method was absolutely ubiquitous in the classical world at one point, and many composers, such as Stravinsky, had their so-called '12-tone period,' even when they were not otherwise ever 12-tone composers exclusively.
There was a huge reaction against the method. John Cage and minimalism are two well-known examples of going the opposite direction harmonically and compositionally (though OF COURSE I do not mean to suggest that Cage or minimalism in classical music can be reduced to a simple reaction against 12-tone method, i'm just trying to give a a sense of the historical trajectory).
Incidentally, many people today love to hate 12-tone music, both inside and outside of the classical music world. I happen to think that it was an extremely interesting moment in the history of classical music, for numerous complicated reasons, and I also completely disagree that the results were always overintellectualized dissonant music (the usual complaint). There was plenty of beautiful 12 tone music written, Alban Berg's Violin Concerto in Memory of an Angel being one of the early examples IMHO.
Really though, the Rambler should be the one to answer this. He is an expert, and his blog is a wonderful source for learning more about contemporary classical music . . .
