# 12 Tone Technique



## Encephalon5 (Mar 9, 2011)

can anyone tell me a bit more about this? all ive been able to find is this:

Twelve-tone technique - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and a matrix calculator on musictheory.net

elaborate on it? help with applications? im wanting to play around with this but im a bit lost.


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Mar 9, 2011)

Twelve tone technique (or twelve tone serialism, or dodecaphony, or a few other names) was a system of composition devised by Arnold Schönberg. (Incidentally, I'm planning on attending a Schönberg concert with my girlfriend for our anniversary. It will kick ass.) Twelve tone serialism is known best for its use of the "tone row", a set of pitches that includes all twelve notes of the chromatic scale in a way that no one pitch has more tonal importance than the others. In this manner, a byproduct of the pitch organization is atonality.

Things to note about twelve tone technique:
&#8226; It is an incredibly ordered pitch system. Every pitch has a purpose.
&#8226; The tone row serves as the building block of various manipulations. Most twelve-tone pieces only use one tone row. However, the very nature of the music is developmental, so the row can be transposed, rotated, inverted, presented in retrograde motion, and be inverted while in retrograde.
&#8226; Because there is no tonal reference, melody is *extremely* important to the music. This means cells, motives, and phrases deserve more attention than in most tonal music.
&#8226; This technique, as it removes the importance of pitch reference, also puts an emphasis on instrumental timbre to mark emotion (rather than, say 'minor = sad, major = happy').

I'm going to leave for a bit, but I can post more later. Hope that helped out.

And I'm here again. A little more:

It's often said (by people who do not understand atonality) that atonal music is dissonant. However, this is erroneous; dissonance requires consonance, and neither can exist without the other. The idea of tonal dissonance is that there are tones, intervals, chords, key centers that oppose the almighty tonic and seek resolution. Dissonance, by definition, desires consonance. Well, if you are to remove the tonic, then you must do so by removing any drive toward the tonic. Schönberg's goal was the 'emancipation of dissonance', freeing pitches from the requirement of resolution and destroying tonal expectation. Really, though, the only thing that was new about twelve-tone serialism was its harmonic language. I'll get into this more tomorrow, maybe mention sonata allegro form, Romanticism, Wagner, Debussy, and a couple other things. There's a remarkably clear line that can be drawn through all of these subjects, leading up to twelve-tone atonality.


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## Guitarchitect (Mar 10, 2011)

This is a nice 12 tone overview - however I think I should address 1 point.


"It's often said (by people who do not understand atonality) that atonal music is dissonant. However, this is erroneous; dissonance requires consonance, and neither can exist without the other."

I understand the point you are making about the contrast of consonance and dissonance as related parameters - but I am not of the opinion that people need to understand music theory to make an aesthetic judgment about it. 

You can explain to someone how the use of Retrograde inversion of a row is particularly brilliant in a particular passage, but that may not make the sound any more consonant to the listener. If someone is a big Handel fan and hears Berg's Lulu it may sound dissonant to them based on their overall aesthetic of what they think music is supposed to sound like. The resultant music from 12 tone compositional methods can produce a variety of effects in people, and even "informed" listeners - in this case people very familiar with serial composers - may still find dissonant elements in the music.

The problem as I see it, is that the western ear is trained to listen to music with an emphasis on tonality. No matter how a row is written, listeners (and particularly most musicians) will hear pockets of harmony, consonance and dissonance. You would have to raise someone on a steady diet of nothing but 12 tone music to get the effect that they were initially looking for - which isn't really feasible.

The good news for me, is that despite that, we got a lot of great music out of it.


Encephalon5: There's a dearth of information on 12 tone (and atonal) techniques as it relates to formal composition - bu assuming that you're posting here and want to relate some of these approaches/concepts/sounds to guitar - you should try to find a Dave Creamer article that he wrote for Guitar Player on generating 12 tone patterns to guitar (Guitar Player Magazine, June 1989.). Very cool stuff - Jason Becker studied with him and the method is peppered all through the Cacophony/Perpetual Motion tracks. Creamer actually had a book that he published with Jim Gleason on 12 tone music - but it's long out of print (His advanced Chord/scale relationship book is still available though)

and of course - there's this obligatory plug as well:

Symmetrical 12 Tone Patterns For Improvisation by Scott Collins in Entertainment

which has a brief intro explaining 12 tone theory and how to utilize 12 tone patterns as an improvisational/compositional tool, and then has an exhaustive list of every pure 12 tone pattern that can be generated through symmetrical intervals.

Also in Yuseef Lateef's amazing - Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns - there's some really cool examples of taking Berg harmonic fragments and extracting melodic ideas from them. He also has a whole section on Joseph Matthias Hauer's Tropes system - an interesting 12 tone approach that was developed concurrently with the methods explored by the Second Viennese School.

Hauer's music is fascinating to me. You can hear one of his two orchastral pieces here:



And you can probably imagine it as a soundtrack to a film Noir.

The resultant effect of many of his piano pieces is surprisingly accessible 12 tone music to my ear.



Finally I'll throw out Meyer Kupferman's Atonal Jazz as well.

Atonal Jazz

Again - strict serial compositional techniques are difficult to adapt to improvisational ideas - so all of the above methods are variations / inspirations on those ideas. I'd recommend going to the wikipedia page for Berg, Webern or Schoenberg and looking for examples and just try playing through the rows to see if something grads your ear.


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Mar 11, 2011)

Guitarchitect said:


> This is a nice 12 tone overview - however I think I should address 1 point.
> 
> 
> "It's often said (by people who do not understand atonality) that atonal music is dissonant. However, this is erroneous; dissonance requires consonance, and neither can exist without the other."
> ...



Point taken. I won't argue that the Western ear seeks a tonic. But on the other hand, I don't really think anybody is going to be listening and saying, "Oh, this little bit is in Ab. And this is in E minor. Ah, this next one is tricky, but I could make a case for C major." Every now and then, you may hear intervals that suggest a tonal center, but in its entirety, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find one or even several tonics. And, of course, this all depends on the row. Some tone rows are more effective in eliminating a tonic than others. I came up with this one for another thread on this forum, showcasing a misappropriation of the concepts of twelve-tone serialism:







It's a completely predictable pattern, and one that could even be assigned a single tonic, yet it follows the "rules": it uses all chromatic tones, none of which repeat before all other pitches sound. It's just a shitty row for atonal composition. That Ron Jarzombek Oscillation Cycles row is the same way, in that it consists of a sequence of arpeggios with roots that you can follow that suggest resolution (although it's a million times better than that fifths sequence thing).

But whether or not you can hear a tonic at any given point in the row, it doesn't matter. What does matter is the elevation of melody, timbre, rhythm and phrasing above tonality. While pitch is, in a way, the most important and controlled aspect of twelve-tone serialism, I also see it as the one part of the music that you disregard while you listen. There are no catchy tunes in twelve-tone music. Rather, you notice all of the other elements of the music more readily. Check out Webern's Op. 21:



What you perceive (or what I perceive, anyway) in this piece is the timbre of the pitches, and that each bit of the row becomes a melody when it is held by one instrument for more than a note or two. Then, you hear the same instrument playing the same pitch later, so you build expectation for the melodic material, but another instrument takes over the row before you can get a second statement of the motive, and your ear is forced to follow a different instrument. Or, the next time you hear a pitch repeated and it is with a different instrument, there is a perceptible development of timbre. Try it out!

Or Messaien's _Mode de valeurs et d'intensités_. The one thing that sticks out to me in this piece is register, because each tone is assigned to a specific octave. Every time you hear a Bb, it's going to be the same Bb, so your ear recognizes it. I wouldn't say that this constitutes a tonal hearing, but there is definitely a tonal reference in the piece, simply for the fact that each tone has its own place.



I don't think of twelve-tone music as strictly atonal. I think it's serial, and the rules of its organization are what determine the perception of pitch interrelation. As I said in my first post, atonality is a byproduct of the tone row, not the other way around. The two listening examples I gave are good showcases of this: every pitch has significance, each one has a character and personality, and no one is more or less important than the others. If you try to look at the row from a tonal perspective, then you will only recognize tonality or the lack thereof. However, once you apply the music to the tone row, pitch seems to be only a sidenote to everything else you are hearing. It is for this reason that I say that there is no consonance or dissonance in this music: you don't really care whether a tone resolves.

I hope that I maintained some cohesion there. Obviously, there are tons of pieces in the twelve-tone repertoire, each with different messages (and perhaps a lot of crappy ones with the same message) and you can make whatever assumptions that you want out of tonality/atonality. I try to push the "there is no dissonance" message because I know people who get wrapped up in dissonance/consonance and call serial music "random notes", when the second Viennese school guys didn't think of their music in terms of dissonance/consonance and certainly didn't feel their music to be random notes. I don't get many chances to talk about twelve-tone aesthetics, so this discussion is appreciated. 



> Also in Yuseef Lateef's amazing - Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns - there's some really cool examples of taking Berg harmonic fragments and extracting melodic ideas from them. He also has a whole section on Joseph Matthias Hauer's Tropes system - an interesting 12 tone approach that was developed concurrently with the methods explored by the Second Viennese School.
> 
> Hauer's music is fascinating to me. You can hear one of his two orchastral pieces here:
> 
> ...


This is really interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing.


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## Guitarchitect (Mar 11, 2011)

I don't want to hijack the thread - but there's also this - which I find particularly inspiring - 

The concept of atonality is a cop out. Todays atonality is tomorrows tonality. At least where conventional notation applies, atonality really only describes the failure of theory to engage a piece at its fullest tonal depths.
- Stanley Jungleib, _Music Possible - A Digital Analysis of Tonality_

Webern is a great point of entry for anyone interested in this style. I think he really got the concept that if you're going to concentrate music so intensely - you'd better make it short so that people (are more like to) walk away with something.

Re reading my post - I just realized I spelled orchestral wrong. Also the whole section in Lateef's book on tropes is I think 2-4 pages - but that's still more than I've seen in any other book not specifically on Hauer.

Anyway - the original post - 12 tone guitar! Yes - find some tone rows. Mess around with playing through them. Manipulate them - make loops, melodies and chords and see where it takes you.


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## Hybrid138 (May 16, 2012)

How do you move from row to row or column to column? I know how to fill a matrix but wasn't taught application.

Here is a cool video for harmonization for 12 tone row

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TJE4ZsPdSc


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## Mr. Big Noodles (May 16, 2012)

That video was... 

I get the impression that Slonimsky is widely misinterpreted. Either that, or he gets more credit than he deserves for some of his works (the Thesaurus Of Scales And Melodic Patterns comes to mind, big time). Sorry, but that harmonization method is bullshit. Going "octave, third, fifth" over and over again is but a mildly serialized way to make something that sounds like shit sound more like shit, as the guy in the video demonstrated. Another case of somebody surrendering their power of invention because Nicolas Slonimsky said so.

If you want to learn twelve-tone technique, go to the master. Schoenberg had two students: Alban Berg and Anton Webern. My personal opinion is that Berg was the best composer out of all of them. Webern was the most dedicated serialist, though.

Anton Webern - Concerto For Nine Instruments


I analyzed the first couple of pages of the score to give you some idea of his process. I went ahead and filled out the matrix. Doing it by hand is a pain in the ass and a load of busywork, so I use this website to do it for me (You have to check "traditional method" to get the same results I got, by the way.). For those that don't know, to do it by hand you put down the first prime form of the row (or "P0", the first 12 pitches of a piece) across the top row, notate the inversion of the prime row (I0) down the first column, then transpose the inverted form across the matrix. The side opposite of the prime forms is called 'retrograde' (R), and the side opposite of the inverted forms is called 'retrograde inversion' (RI). At the end, there should be a diagonal line of the first pitch going down the middle of the matrix. On mine, you can see a continuous diagonal line of B's. Some videos on Youtube tell you to do that line first, but it's supposed to be a sort of self-check, so it's better that you don't do that and use it to gauge whether you've made a mistake later on.






And now, an analyzed score. Everything is notated at concert pitch.











If you look at the first three measures, we have twelve notes broken into four groups of three. This should be your first indication that constructing a tone row isn't a completely random process. Well, at least it isn't in Webern's case. Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez? Eeeeeh... we don't talk about them. If you plug those pitches in, three at a time, into this PC set calculator (another fine feature of that website), I believe you'll find a bunch of 014 sets. This is something that the Second Viennese School guys liked to do: make rows out of interlocking sets of trichords, tetrachords and hexachords. Webern particularly enjoyed symmetrical rows made in this fashion.

You should also take note of the orchestration, because the entire point of this style of music is to exploit instrumental timbres. The row is (in the excerpt we're looking at) distributed to a group of instruments, then the next row is give to another group, and so on. Eventually, the distribution of the row is spread across multiple groups. In that way, he creates density.

The last two measures on the first page provide an answer to Hybrid138's question. How do you move to a different row? Simple - you just do. And he's not being a pussy about it, either. He jumps from P0 to RI1. Were he Ron Jarzombek, all we would ever hear is P0 and R0.

Moving on to the second page, the first system is sort of the same story. In measures 9 and 10, though, we gets some harmonization. In case you're wondering, Webern's not using the method in that video you posted - the chords are derived entirely from the series and take on the same rules as though they were played as individual notes. In the last system, you can see some overlap of the rows, getting to that density thing I was talking about. In the last couple of measures, he actually repeats some notes. It's not kosher twelve-tone serialism, but nobody said life was easy.

Hopefully, that answered some questions.


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## morrowcosom (May 17, 2012)

Twelve tone rows are awesome for composing some seemingly free-form leads that actually have structure, and as a result catch your ear a little. 

To me, twelve tone rows sound most awesome on saxophones. 

The Ron Jarzombek circle of twelve tones gives you some of that effect and you are able to use chords through your shifts, but it is still tonal. If you play 4 groups of 3 you are just making 4 key changes. To me this is good if you just want to easily write some really spastic metal/metal core that still has some structure. You have to put some real personality in it to keep from sounding like a robot though.


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## works0fheart (Mar 4, 2014)

I know this is an old thread but I'm learning this technique right now. Anyone out there with any advice or further input, I would love to hear what you have to say.


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Mar 5, 2014)

Check out Schoenberg's Structural Functions of Harmony. It doesn't discuss twelve-tone technique, but it sheds some light into how Schoenberg thought of harmony. Mind you, it's not a beginning harmony text; I have trouble following what he's saying without some close scrutiny (usually because his language is completely obtuse), but he has an interesting take on harmonic progression and succession. Understand that the music that preceded Schoenberg's twelve-tone experiments was very chromatic, increasingly non-functional, or at least so far removed from traditional tonality that traditional harmonic language was beginning to deteriorate in trying to describe it (we're talking about Richard Strauss and Wagner here). Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique can be seen as an outcropping of late Romantic harmony, which descended from much the tamer harmony of the Classical period, which has its roots in Baroque music, which has its roots in the Renaissance, which has its roots in the organum of the Middle Ages, which came from Catholic plainchant, which probably came from ancient Carolignian and Roman chant, which may or may not have been based on Greek modal practice from a zillion years ago. In other words, twelve-tone harmony is not an alternative to traditional tonal harmony, but rather a development thereof.


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## ihunda (Mar 5, 2014)

This video by Vi Hart was mind blowing to me and made me realise the potential of twelve tone rows, this girl is F*N talented!


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## AugmentedFourth (Mar 5, 2014)

I know that this crops up a lot on this forum because it is metal music related, but I would strongly recommend checking out Ron Jarzombek's take on twelve tone music, if you haven't already.

The Circle of 12 Tones

The Circle of 12 Tones Part II


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## asher (Mar 6, 2014)

ihunda said:


> This video by Vi Hart was mind blowing to me and made me realise the potential of twelve tone rows, this girl is F*N talented!




That was incredibly, incredibly funny. And also very cool.


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## Hybrid138 (Mar 7, 2014)

That drawing video was awesome!!!! Thanks man!


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## works0fheart (Mar 10, 2014)

AugmentedFourth said:


> I know that this crops up a lot on this forum because it is metal music related, but I would strongly recommend checking out Ron Jarzombek's take on twelve tone music, if you haven't already.
> 
> The Circle of 12 Tones
> 
> The Circle of 12 Tones Part II



I'd been following a lot of his stuff and hadn't seen these 2 pages yet. Very helpful, thanks for posting. And yes, while I do love the sound of the stuff in metal, I can appreciate it in many types of music. It takes awhile to really realize what it is that you're hearing but once it clicks that's it.


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## Given To Fly (Mar 11, 2014)

Mr. Big Noodles said:


> Check out Schoenberg's Structural Functions of Harmony. It doesn't discuss twelve-tone technique, but it sheds some light into how Schoenberg thought of harmony. Mind you, it's not a beginning harmony text; I have trouble following what he's saying without some close scrutiny (usually because his language is completely obtuse), but he has an interesting take on harmonic progression and succession. Understand that the music that preceded Schoenberg's twelve-tone experiments was very chromatic, increasingly non-functional, or at least so far removed from traditional tonality that traditional harmonic language was beginning to deteriorate in trying to describe it (we're talking about Richard Strauss and Wagner here). Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique can be seen as an outcropping of late Romantic harmony, which descended from much the tamer harmony of the Classical period, which has its roots in Baroque music, which has its roots in the Renaissance, which has its roots in the organum of the Middle Ages, which came from Catholic plainchant, which probably came from ancient Carolignian and Roman chant, which may or may not have been based on Greek modal practice from a zillion years ago. In other words, twelve-tone harmony is not an alternative to traditional tonal harmony, but rather a development thereof.



If you stop at 12 tone composition (lat 20's) and look no further into what took place in the art music world during the 20th century, then it might be possible to call 12 tone harmony a development of tonal harmony. However, what Schoenberg started created a huge rift in the art music world that lasts to this day, though not as severe as it once was. There are heated arguments similar in strength as our active vs. passive pickup arguments. People get banned over those!


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## pestilentdecay (Mar 11, 2014)

Want to try to apply this to microtonality, specifically 25 notes per octave on my microtonal guitar. But it seems very difficult, as 12 tone serialism is already sort of difficult.


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Mar 11, 2014)

Given To Fly said:


> If you stop at 12 tone composition (lat 20's) and look no further into what took place in the art music world during the 20th century, then it might be possible to call 12 tone harmony a development of tonal harmony.



It is most definitely developed out of tonality. Schoenberg consciously took note of the increasingly chromatic pitch language of the new century, still covered in amniotic fluid, and devised a system of parameters for a completely chromatic music. There are less direct developments and all sorts of anachronistic flukes in our music (the bichord at the beginning of this piece from 1737 comes to mind, or Gesualdo's inventive use of chromaticism at the end of the Italian Renaissance, so often compared to Wagner), but the advent of dodecaphony is not one of them.



> However, what Schoenberg started created a huge rift in the art music world that lasts to this day, though not as severe as it once was. There are heated arguments similar in strength as our active vs. passive pickup arguments. People get banned over those!


I don't think it's fair to scapegoat Schoenberg for "unpretty" things in the twentieth century, or the twelve-tone technique, for that matter. I remember in my counterpoint class, somebody was arguing with the teacher because they thought perfect fourths sounded okay and were therefore completely admissible for the purposes of the class. My teacher's response was that we dropped two atomic bombs, so suddenly a perfect fourth doesn't sound quite as bad as it did to the ears of 1560. You have to remember that society evolves, and the twentieth century was an incredibly turbulent time: in a very short time frame, we had the rise and fall of fascism, two world wars, the atomic age, the space age, the information age, McCarthy, various ongoing struggles for civil rights, numerous economic collapses, globalization, chemical warfare, biological warfare, glow in the dark cats, and we took a hefty chunk out of our atmosphere. That's just for starters. Since art reflects society, we can expect that the artistic language would evolve and become just as turbulent. Just look at the psychedelic movement and the American popular response to the Vietnam War, especially in the arts and politics. Watch Apocalypse Now sometime; that shit is crazy. Schoenberg's contribution might have been the language of some composers while all this was going on, but it is by no means the reason why they wrote the way they did.

As for a rift, it's a good thing it is (or was) there. It would be terrible if we only had one camp in our arts. We've had an entire century of innovation, of people devising countless ways to approach the same old medium, which is due in part to these opponents reacting to each other. Then there are regressive artistic trends, which always exist since people are generally conservative. Neo-Romaticism is backwards-looking and doesn't do justice to the progressive OG Romantics, but that stuff has its place in escapism just as much as avant garde music has its place in, uh, universities and rich people's houses.



pestilentdecay said:


> Want to try to apply this to microtonality, specifically 25 notes per octave on my microtonal guitar. But it seems very difficult, as 12 tone serialism is already sort of difficult.



Composition is the thing that is difficult. Serialism makes things easy for you by removing your choices. Finding a way to put it together is the trick. (Fair warning: I'm not a serialist, so I probably have no idea what I'm talking about.)


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