(music playing)
Alright, we've been talking about
the style of modern music, and, one of the things that we talked about, was the fact
that composers
try to move away from the idea being in a particular key
or to develop the idea a tonality. One of the ways that composers tried to
accomplish that
was through a system called 12-tone
music or the fancy technical term for it is dodecaphonic
music. So, 12-tone, we know that the
chromatic scale has twelve tones so that's where the 12-tone comes from.
So, you think, well isn't in all music twelve-tone? Technically,
yes, but it's the way the 12 tones are organized
that makes this particular strategy unique.
So, what happens in 12-tone music is that
the composer takes those 12 tones and
they have to use all 12 of them before they can go back and use the first one
again.
So, we know... as we know from our
listening to different kinds of music over the course of this class, we,
using scales and harmony in tonality, there are certain notes that get repeated more
often than others, and that's
what leads us to a sense that those being the important notes, and that's how we get our sense
of key.
So, if you don't want to have a sense of key, one of the ways to try to avoid that
is to not have any particular note be repeated more than others so that it
becomes sort of the central note,
and that was the idea behind 12-tone music. So, I've written my own little tone row
here, that's what we call
the structure that you start with.
So, I'm just going to play you my little town row here
so you can get an idea of how the notes would happen.
(plays twelve tones)
There's no way to predict what the next note is going to be in that, and that's
what tonality does, it helps us to predict things. So, if you're trying to avoid that,
here's a way to do it. So, we would call that the tone row,
but, if we did it tone row over and over and over again, eventually that tone row
would sort of develop its own tonality.
So, we have to be able to do some other things with it. Not to mention
that it might be kinda boring to hear the same 12 tones over and over again in that
odd order. So, there are three other things a composer typically does
with a tone row. The first is
to play it backwards so here's my same tone row
going backward.
(plays twelve tones in reverse order)
Same exact series of notes, except I started at the end and went backwards.
Again, if you do it often enough, it begins to develop a sense of
going to a particular place. So, another thing
that we could do is
what we call an inversion of the row. So, what happens in an inversion is...
So, we'll take the first two notes of my little tone row, and those were
E and B-flat. Those notes are
One, two, three four, five six... One, two, three, four five, six...
six half steps apart, and I went down
six half steps from E to B-flat.
So, in an inversion, you take the same distance, same number half steps, but you go
the opposite direction.
Now, it happens that in this case one, two, three, four, five, six takes me up to B-flat.
Again, I happened to have picked a tritone
as my first interval. So, in that case, it's same note,
but my next set in the original row from B-flat
down to A, which is a half step. So, instead of going down a half step,
I go up a half-step. So, you do that throughout the entire
tone row. You just take the interval and go the opposite direction.
So here's my new tone row.
(plays new 12-tone sequence)
That's my inversion
of the tone row. The fourth thing that I can do
is to take that inversion... take my inversion
and do it backward. So, I have
backwards and upside down.
I did it backwards. So I can take my inversion and do it upside down.
Anyway, I'll get it straight here in a minute. So, you can do the regular tone row;
you can do your inversion of the tone row, which is to
turn the intervals in the opposite direction; you can do the
tone row backwards, which is called retrograde;
and then you can do a retrograde inversion,
where you take your backward version and then invert all
of its intervals. So, here's my original
(plays selection)
And, here's my retrograde inversion. This is upside down and backward
of our original tone row.
(plays selection)
So, you can that that's just kind of
odd, right? It's really hard to imagine composing the melody with that,
but, the composer doesn't necessarily have to take that and make it the melody.
As you'll see when we look at some pieces that use this particular
technique,
they might put two of the notes -
two sequential pitches from the tone row together
to make the little harmony part so you can
play them together. Sometimes you will hear that one note gets
repeated - like quick really fast rhythm usually -
before it goes on. So we can make clusters have notes together.
So, we have a little bit more variety than just those notes.
So... so who did this anyway?
One of the most famous composers of twelve-tone music is
Arnold Schoenberg, who was an Austrian composer
who came to America during World War II, as did many
composers... especially Jewish composers from Europe.
As a... as a conductor - he was also conductor
in addition to being a composer - he was very interested in promoting new music.
We need somebody who will say, "Hey, you need to listen to this new com...
new music. Try this out." And, we still have
conductors today that really specialize in introducing new works to the world.
In 1905, he wrote a piece called Pelleas und Melisande which is a popular
storyline - it appears in
several different kinds of compositions. This piece was important because the
first piece in which we have a trombone glissando
written. Remember when we looked at trombone, we saw that it had a slide -
it would move. That means that you can
just go me (imitates sliding trombone) and you've all heard that, because it's very common now,
but, Schoenberg was the first person to do that in art music piece
in 1905. In 1907, he wrote a piece called Kammersymphonie which is...
means "chamber symphony," and, this was his first attempt at getting away from
tonality. He hasn't yet moved into twelve-tone. He's trying to
figure out a way to make that work. So, what he did was, instead using our
triads that were built on thirds (plays triad)
Probably can't hear that can you?
(replays triad)
The three notes together. He would do chords that were built on fourths...
(plays fourths-based selection)
which is something we saw the impressionist composers use.
Because the fourth don't... have that same feeling of leading somewhere that
the thirds do. That was his sort of
attempt at making so... a tonality there. Another thing that he did in this piece
was to...
have a dissonance that never
resolved itself. We like our dissonances to
resolve two consonance. Dissonance, you know, comes from competing sound.
Consonances are relaxing of the sound. He would have a dissonance that just didn't
resolve.
So, you... you would continue to have this feeling of tension which was...
what he wanted. He was
an impressionist in part of his career.
As I've said to you that using the f... chords built on fourths is very typical of
impression style. Like a lot of...
musicians, he was also a painter. Not me! I'm kidding. I'm terrible
at drawing things. But, he painted as a hobby and his paintings are
impressionist, as well. So, he's... In 1907, he's been trying to
figure out how to make atonal thing work. By 1909, he's just completely given
up on putting key signatures on pieces at all. A key signature is those sharps and
flats at the beginning of the piece of music that tell us what key
we're in. So, if he's trying to get away from the idea of being in a key,
here's the first step - throw out a key signature. Then we don't have a key,
right? So, by 1909, he's just not using
key signatures at all. His first really...
atonal kinda piece of music was
his three piano pieces - Opus 11. So, it's fairly early
in his... output...
but the first piece he wrote that really uses that twelve-tone idea - where you have
your tone row and your inversions and your retrogrades -
was his Opus 25. So,
Opus 11, he started experimenting, but, by Opus 25,
he's really committed to... to trying out this twelve-tone approach.
So, we're going to take a look at that piece. I want you
to listen to that, and, the video that I have for you has the music so you can see,
you know, what we call sheet music. So, you can see
how the notes kind of jump all over the place.
The fact that there are lots of what we would call accidental sharps and flats
written on on the notes instead having a key signature
shows us that it's a tone row because,
in most music, you would put that key signature at the beginning
that tells you all these notes are always going to be flat unless I tell you otherwise.
When you see a piece of music with this many sharps and flats and things written
into it,
then you can know that they're really trying to avoid a sense of key.
So, I'll just warn you upfront this is not perhaps everybody's cup of tea.
We don't... I don't know of anybody who's still composing in the twelve-tone technique,
but, it was... it was an experiment. They just wanted to see if we
could get away from the idea of tonality.
Perhaps, unfortunately, our brains really liked tonality.
They... they want structure. They want something that they can remember and
sort of clue into. That's why phone numbers have seven digits because that's
about as many numbers as our
little brains can process. So, that... there's units of things that...
that tend to work best with our brains and 12 is just very difficult for us to
process. We could...
A series of 12 is harder for us to to organize in our heads.
So, if you don't like the piece, that's okay. You can take it as a...
sort of like a lot of modern art. You don't really know what they're talking about
but you willing to look at it and... see what you can do. So,
go listen now to the suite for piano,
Opus 25, by Arnold Schoenberg and get your first taste of twelve-tone
music.