hey, guys, welcome to 12tone.
today, we’re gonna talk about 12-tone composition.
as a warning, this is some pretty advanced stuff.
so advanced, in fact, that it’s almost entirely unconnected to traditional functional harmony,
which means we can skip ahead and stare straight into the abyss.
so if you’re wondering what it looks like out here in the compositional deep end, brace
yourself, because things are about to get weird.
but first let’s look at the history.
through the development of western harmony, we’ve seen a fairly consistent trend toward
dissonance.
as time goes on, we lean more on unstable dominant function chords, we wait longer to
resolve, and we use weirder, harsher chords.
in effect, we start to let go of our tonal grounding.
eventually, in the early 20th century, we reached the logical conclusion of that progression,
which Arnold Schoenberg referred to as emancipating the dissonance.
this compositional style was known as free atonality.
after that, the next step was an attempt to regain some form of structure.
this is the role that 12-tone writing, and serialism in general, sought to fill.
invented primarily by Schoenberg and developed by him and the students of the Second Viennese
School, 12-tone writing replaced the rules and conventions of functional harmony with
their own strict structural requirements, instating order over the chaos of atonality.
the fundamental conceit of 12-tone composition is the idea that all 12 notes are equal.
there are no special notes, no tonic, no dominant.
no note is more important than any other note.
in order to accomplish this, the rules state that we have to play every note once before
we begin the cycle again.
so for instance if our piece started on an F, we couldn’t play F again until we’d
played all 11 of the other notes.
further, in a given composition, we construct a specific set or order for the 12 notes,
known as a tone row, or just a row.
the row is stated in its entirety, over and over, to form the piece.
if your instrumentation allows it, you can also have multiple statements of the row happening
in parallel.
this is especially useful with piano, with independent left and right hand lines.
but even then, it would be incredibly boring to just loop the same 12 notes, in the same
order, for an entire composition, so we are allowed to apply a couple transformations.
the first transformation we’re allowed is called the retrograde.
this is pretty simple: we just play the row backwards.
so if our row was this: (pow) the retrograde would sound like this: (wop) the second transformation
is known as the inversion.
this one’s more complicated.
in the inversion, for each interval, we flip the direction in which it’s going.
so if our row starts by ascending a major third, the inversion starts by descending
the same distance.
so the inversion of our row would sound like this: (zip) and of course we can combine the
two, forming the retrograde inversion: (piz)
the last transformation we’re allowed to apply is transposition.
we can take the entire row and shift every note up the same interval.
in effect, we can start our row wherever we want, as long as the intervals remain the
same.
and, of course, we can apply this to the retrograde, the inversion, and the retrograde inversion
as well.
note that 12-tone composition says nothing about octave.
only the note name itself matters.
for instance, our prime row, as written, starts by going from C up to E. however, it’s equally
valid to go from C down to E, or to jump from C up to E in a higher octave.
we’re also not bound by rhythm.
we can sustain each note for as long or as short as we want.
you can even repeat a note more than once, but once you leave you can’t come back until
you’ve completed the row.
you can even create chords of sorts by playing multiple consecutive notes in the row simultaneously.
now, all of this is great, and mathematically fascinating, but what does it sound like?
what sort of music does it make?
well, of course, that depends what you do with it.
you can make nearly tonal music, you can write rows designed to emphasize dissonant intervals,
or you can just go nuts and make your row with a random number generator.
but to give you a sense of the possibilities, here’s a short piece of my own composition.
(ZWABOW!)
so that’s the basics of 12-tone writing.
we’ll come back to this, but for now play around with it, and keep on rockin’.