# Could someone explain tone rows?



## Bruiser (Oct 7, 2010)

I don't know anything about theory besides the fundamentals, and I've seen this term thrown around on here, sometimes to describe bands I've been listening to for years. I've Googled some explanations that went over my head, so what's a simple explanation for tone rows?


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## Winspear (Oct 7, 2010)

It's a way to make patterns to play. I presume there are other types of tone row - but the type I am familiar with is that used in serialism. 

You take your 12 chromatic notes and arrange them in any order that sounds best to you. 
Now when you write your piece, you can only play the notes in this order. Any octave though. 
You can variate the rows in several ways:
-Reverse it, play it backwards

-Invert the intervals - for example...
Lets say your tone row is (on frets) 0 3 5 4 6 7 2 1 9 8 10 11
The first interval is up from 0 to 3...so you go backwards 3 instead.
You now have
0 9
Next was 3 to 5...
0 9 7
5 to 4...
0 9 7 6

And so on. Then you can reverse that.

You'll have your prime row, reverse prime row, inverted row, and reverse inverted row. You can play these in any order but one must be completed before another is used. 

This is what I remember as the basic rules of serialism. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.


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## Winspear (Oct 7, 2010)

That gives a much more melodic and memorable sound to 'random note chromatic music'. I wrote a piece like this and it actually ended up having a catchy melody 

I suppose you could apply the same ideas to normal melodic scales to find different motives for a song.


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## bostjan (Oct 7, 2010)

That is correct.

It is typically considered the standard atonal composition tool. Atonal essentially means dissonant or tension building. More often, however, you hear atonal music used as an "out" sound.


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## MusicMetalHead (Oct 7, 2010)

I read about a practice method on here awhile ago kind of like this. It worked by taking the chromatic scale in any position up all 6,7,8 strings and you could play them however you want but you cant repeat and you cant have any "chromatic" passages in any octave. Basically meaning if you played a b2 the next note could not be a b flat b or a c no matter the octave. Then you kept playing until you had played all the notes in the scale. Very useful tool for learning the notes on the fretboard and for making kool passages. Except from what I'm reading here tone rows is a much more systematic way of doing it. Hmm, might try one of these days.


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## Holy Katana (Oct 7, 2010)

MusicMetalHead said:


> I read about a practice method on here awhile ago kind of like this. It worked by taking the chromatic scale in any position up all 6,7,8 strings and you could play them however you want but you cant repeat and you cant have any "chromatic" passages in any octave. Basically meaning if you played a b2 the next note could not be a b flat b or a c no matter the octave. Then you kept playing until you had played all the notes in the scale. Very useful tool for learning the notes on the fretboard and for making kool passages. Except from what I'm reading here tone rows is a much more systematic way of doing it. Hmm, might try one of these days.


Yeah, that seems to have borrowed some of its rules from Schoenberg.


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## MusicMetalHead (Oct 7, 2010)

Holy Katana said:


> Yeah, that seems to have borrowed some of its rules from Schoenberg.



Arnold Schoenberg? Thank god for wikipedia, lol. Yeah. In hindsight this whole thing does sound like a Schoenberg principle. It might even be Schoenberg's. I will have to check out some of his compositions. I am tone deaf so I do not really hear key tonality as much as I do tension and resolution. ex this note leads to this note which can resolve to this note after adding this note chromatically. A key can hint at this and make it more natural but it is just as easy I guess to get it atonally.


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Oct 8, 2010)

Tone rows are a serial atonalist composition technique, as others have said. You can think of serialism as a set techniques that you use to manipulate one cell of music (perhaps a motive or melody) within strict guidelines. You may already know the term, "atonality". If not, it's the lack of a perceived tonal centre in a piece of music. Basically means that there is no key. At the very basest of definitions, key is the hierarchy of pitches, most likely with one pitch being more important than all the rest (and we will call that pitch the tonal centre). In atonality, the aim is to destroy that hierarchy, so that no one pitch is heard as more important in the music than the others. Sort of like musical communism. All this removes tonal predictability.

So, now that we have the definition and objective of serial atonality, we can look at how the tone row fits in.

A tone row is a set of pitch material (it has no rhythm or instrumental timbres at this point) that includes all twelve tones of the chromatic scale. However, beyond that, there are rules to constructing the row:

&#8226; No pitch may be repeated until every other tone has been sounded. Ornamentations such as trills are exempt from this rule, as is the direct repetition of a tone provided it doesn't have more focus than any of the other tones.

&#8226; Avoid groupings that suggest chords or chord progressions. There's a video that seems to turn up in threads like this - Ron Jarzombek explaining and playing 'Oscillation Cycles'. While it demonstrates a couple things effectively, the row is not really atonal, as it is made up of three groupings of diminished seventh chords. Diminished seventh chords are tonally ambiguous, but still have a distinctively tonal tendency.

&#8226; Avoid other figures that suggest a tonal centre, like scales, or a straight chromatic scale, or recognizable bits of a scale.

&#8226; And I'm sure there's a bunch of other stuff, but I don't know it too well.

A tone row achieves atonality by not having a predictable pitch pattern. You can probably come up with one pretty easily, given the guidelines. Constructing a row gives you the "prime form" (or 'P') of the row. This just means, "Hey, this is the row!"

Transformations of the row are often applied to the composition of twelve-tone serialism. These include:

&#8226; Transposition - starting the row on another pitch. The intervals are all the same, still. Say our row is C G# A# A G B E F# D# C# F D. A transposition would be D A# C B A C# F# G# F D# G E. That's the exact same thing, but up a major second.

&#8226; Retrograde - the same pitches, but backwards. If our row is C G# A# A G B E F# D# C# F D, the retrograde is D F C# D# F# E B G A A# G# C, or some transposition thereof.

&#8226; Inversion - the same intervals exist between the notes, but going the other direction. So, our row is C G# A# A G B E F# D# C# F D. The distance between C and G# (or Ab), assuming the interval is ascending, is an augmented fifth (or minor sixth). In an inversion of the tone row, we would descend an augmented fifth/minor sixth. Continuing his would give us the inverted row, C E D D# F C# G# F# A B G A#.

&#8226; Retrograde Inversion - the prime row inverted and flipped backwards. If you take the example inverted row and put it in retrograde, you have a retrograde inversion of the prime: A# G B A F# G# C# F D# D E C.

There are other transformations, such as combinatoriality and rotation, but this is probably heavy enough for you right now. Transposition, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion are the big ones. The forms of the rows are abbreviated, P (prime), I (inversion), R (retrograde), and RI (retrograde inversion).

Composers in the twelve-tone style might use rows that have clever things worked into them. Anton Webern, one of Arnold Schönberg's pupils, had a thing for tone rows that were symmetric (this makes inversion the same as prime).

I should also point out that while some may call twelve-tone music dissonant, there is no dissonance in twelve-tone music. What I am saying is that dissonance implies that there is consonance or resolution, which would mean a tonal centre. As twelve-tone music is atonal, there is neither consonance nor dissonance.

Also keep in mind that the tone row is a serialization of pitch. In some serial music, this is the only aspect of the music that is serialized. Rhythm and dynamics are also serialized in some serial music, as well as range and articulation. In total serialization, you might see the row divided up amongst various instruments (a technique called 'klangfarbenmelodie', German for 'tone-color melody'), which have specific pitches in the row. For the note D, it may only be played by the trumpet at D5, for a dotted quarter note's duration, mezzo-forte, articulated tenuto. The famous historical example of total serialism is Messiaen's "Mode de Valeurs et d'Intensités".



However, serialism is not something that is exclusive to atonal music. The transformations I discussed before are freely available in tonal music, and, indeed, have been practiced there for hundreds of years. Serialization of pitch and rhythm even existed in medieval church music - check out isorhythm and panisorhythm. Serialism exists in many degrees, and one could even argue that deciding to stick within one key or use one scale would be a loose serialization of pitch.


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## Holy Katana (Oct 8, 2010)

MusicMetalHead said:


> Arnold Schoenberg? Thank god for wikipedia, lol. Yeah. In hindsight this whole thing does sound like a Schoenberg principle. It might even be Schoenberg's. I will have to check out some of his compositions. I am tone deaf so I do not really hear key tonality as much as I do tension and resolution. ex this note leads to this note which can resolve to this note after adding this note chromatically. A key can hint at this and make it more natural but it is just as easy I guess to get it atonally.


Just realize that he didn't start using the twelve-tone method until the '20s. He wrote atonal music before then, but it didn't have a unifying principle like serialism. In fact, that's why he came up with the method. 

Also, twelve-tone music tends to resist tension and resolution. It's mostly just tension. 

I have a strange -- some might say unhealthy -- fascination with serialism, so don't take that as a damning of the style. I love it, even though my attempts to write serialist music have been so far unsuccessful. It's really hard to do. You have to make a tone row, and some tone rows are better than others. And it's such a foreign method of composition that it can be really frustrating. It requires much more patience than writing tonal music or freely atonal music. That's why the music I write tends to be somewhere in between those two. I'm a big fan of neoclassical composers like Hindemith, Stravinsky, and Shostakovitch, so I prefer to write music that is extremely chromatic, sometimes veering into atonality, while still being what could be considered "tonal." I've been working on a piece for piano for a while (which admittedly sucks ass) that does exactly that.

Here's an excerpt from Schoenberg's 3rd String Quartet:



Notice that he indeed repeats tones, but only consecutively. That's allowed according to his rules.


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