# 12 Tone Rows



## AJ Harvey (Aug 13, 2010)

A twelve tone row is a scale that made up of all 12 of the Chromatic tones,(A,A#,B,C,C#,D,D#,E,F,F#,G,G#) not usually in ascending order. 

One Example I use is D#,E,D,G#,C#,C,F#,B,G,Bb,F,A this example can be heard on Upload Complete. myspace.com/lastchancetoreason

When I compose a Twelve Tone Rows, I usually start on the first note and build it one note at a time using intervals that sound good to me.


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## Customisbetter (Aug 13, 2010)

I don't get it. But congrats on being on Thrash and Burn dude!


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## vgguru39 (Aug 13, 2010)

A twelve tone row isn't a scale because the word scale implies a key. It's a different type of compositional device. When used in classical music the row is used to help the composer avoid any semblance of tonality if desired. It's basically just there to make sure you are using all twelve notes equally and to make sure they don't imply a tonal center. 

That being said not all 12 tone music is atonal. Some metal bands have used tone rows for short flurries of cacophony in their music. I know for a fact Alex Webster used a tone row in part of one of the Cannibal Corpse songs off of Kill. 

I'm not trying to insult the OP. In fact I LOVE last chance to reason. I'm just hoping to clarify so a theory noob doesn't come in here and get confused.


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## Maestro (Aug 14, 2010)

I don't if I would say that twelve tone is used to avoid any semblance of tonality. It's a different way to approach it. One of the ideas behind the twelve tone system is to allow the composer to create their own set of rules and progressions within each piece. 

You create a row using all twelve tones, put it into a matrix, then follow the rules of twelve tone music. Your piece is supposed to make sense because you are using a constant set of notes and its variations. It's almost like you are creating your own music theory for that particular piece.

I don't know if the word scale necessarily implies a tonal center. Look at the chromatic scale or whole tone scale for example. Both imply no tonal center.


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Aug 14, 2010)

+1 on the last couple of posts. You can make some very tonal rows, and there are other methods for achieving atonality that don't involve serialism.

But as with any other organization of music, it's not as simple as "I use X compositional technique". There is a great depth of thought that can be put into things like a tone row. Anton Webern was famous for creating rows that were plurally symmetrical (row is intervallically symmetrical going both backward and forward, first four notes are symmetric to the next four notes and the next four notes, etc.), and that was just his thing. His was a very mathematical approach, but it was what the music demanded.

One of the problems that occurred to the Second Viennese School was that playing tone rows in prime form using classical orchestration techniques was, well, boring. This is why Schönberg classified Prime, Retrograde, Inversion, and Retrograde inversion: so that a row could be exploited to create counterpoint and melodic interest instead of just hearing transpositions of the prime form over and over again (or even the prime, untransposed). Also, one of the emotive elements of serialist music is the timbre of the instruments playing it and the mixture of said timbres, so a part of serialist counterpoint is the back-and-forth exchange of parts of the row between different instruments in the orchestra, referred to as 'klangfarbenmelodie' (sound-color-melody). All of this is meant to give interest to the row, and exists in varying degrees throughout twelve-tone music. There are some pieces that make extensive use of these techniques, and others that will use them very minimally: solo piano pieces in which the prime form of the row is the only one present, or the piece in the rather well-known Jarzombek video, Oscillation Cycles, which uses the prime and retrograde of the row between two electric guitars.


My opinion is that this video is posted on this forum too much, but the elision at 7:40 is fecking awesome. 

Of course, there's a good amount of other serialist techniques which exist outside of the concept of tone rows (but are frequently present in twelve-tone music), such as serialization of rhythm and dynamics, and even instrumentation (seems implicit, but Brian Ferneyhough's Bone Alphabet has instructions for the choice and placement of various percussion instruments that gives performers some choice but is also a set limitation; not twelve-tone, however).

Total serialization is an interesting concept that often begs the "Why?" question, and is, in some cases, pure wankery. But in composing in serialist technique, mathematic patterns that do not normally exist in non-serialist music quickly emerge, which might be of musical interest to the composer. It's not an entirely new concept, either. Isorhythm and panisorhythm are techniques that we might ascribe to the twentieth-century serialist idiom, but are a feature of some medieval music. Self-imposed musical limitations have long been of interest to musicians.

All this said, I think the song in the OP is pretty awesome. Nice composition, and the vocals fit very nicely.


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## Keytarist (Aug 14, 2010)

The Ron Jarzombek video is pretty cool. The composition he is playing is a good example of the 12 tone technique applied to metal. But he used a very tonal approach to dodecaphony: a tone row made of dimminished sevenths chords. Since the 'crisis of tonal music' was long ago, it isn't wrong to use this technique to get tonal sounds. However; in the context of atonalism, using that tone row would be a mistake for its tonal properties. Also, using this symmetrical chord would lead to invariance (when something stills the same) under all its transformations (P, R, I and RI), something not desired in some cases.
I just want to make clear this detail, because if someone is studying atonalism may think that Oscillation Cycles is atonal music when actually it isn't. One could argue infinitely about what is tonal or atonal but the fact is that the song is ambiguous from an atonal point of view. In metal context, works really good though (because there aren't such rules). And the most important thing, sounds really neat!.


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Aug 14, 2010)

True: a diminished seventh chord is tonally ambiguous, but hardly atonal. A very symmetrical row does not take to the P, R, I, RI transformations well, yielding transpositions of the prime row in some cases (and duplicates of the prime in some of those). In the case of Jarzombek's row, I is identical to R and RI is identical to P. Regarding the tonal properties of some rows, I believe I realized a row in a thread here a long time ago that had some ridiculously tonal properties. Like I IV V ridiculous. 

Or check out this row:







Not exactly what Schönberg had in mind when he was trying to abolish the tyranny of the dominant and tonic.


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## Keytarist (Aug 15, 2010)

In the last weeks, I have been composing a dodecaphonic piece trying to respect all those rules. In once, I had a tone row that its inversion gave an V7 | Im so I discarded it. Then, with a new tone row, I had a tritone resolution just by sheer coincidence between a prime and one transformation. Now I believe that some of these things happen at random and the results of this technique are often unpredictable. One can avoid some undesired things, though. I realized that using a non thematic approach to the music works very good when composing atonal stuff. I will try to explain. If you work your melodic ideas to make them very heterogeneous and unrecognizable, you will have a dense mixture of ideas that drift away from the standard concept of a theme and the development of it. So if you have some tonal relationships, they will go unnoticed. The use of consecutive dissonances also helps. 
To exemplify this 'non thematic approach', listen to the brief first part of Op.25 by Arnold Schoenberg. Try to remember the motifs and melody. Is it possible?.


I post this video everywhere. 

Finally, is that tone row made of fifths made by Schoenberg or just an example?. I'm trying to gather information of this sir and would be pretty weird to find that one of his compositions is made out of fifths.


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Aug 15, 2010)

Keytarist said:


> In the last weeks, I have been composing a dodecaphonic piece trying to respect all those rules. In once, I had a tone row that its inversion gave an V7 | Im so I discarded it. Then, with a new tone row, I had a tritone resolution just by sheer coincidence between a prime and one transformation. Now I believe that some of these things happen at random and the results of this technique are often unpredictable. One can avoid some undesired things, though. I realized that using a non thematic approach to the music works very good when composing atonal stuff. I will try to explain. If you work your melodic ideas to make them very heterogeneous and unrecognizable, you will have a dense mixture of ideas that drift away from the standard concept of a theme and the development of it. So if you have some tonal relationships, they will go unnoticed. The use of consecutive dissonances also helps.
> To exemplify this 'non thematic approach', listen to the brief first part of Op.25 by Arnold Schoenberg. Try to remember the motifs and melody. Is it possible?.
> 
> 
> I post this video everywhere.




I wonder sometimes whether the shortness of many atonal pieces helped in eliminating predictability. I've heard of the brevity of Webern's compositions cited as a reaction to Romantic excess, but from a psychological standpoint, it seems that the elimination of (harmonic) cadence would follow the elimination of any sort of buildup.



> Finally, is that tone row made of fifths made by Schoenberg or just an example?. I'm trying to gather information of this sir and would be pretty weird to find that one of his compositions is made out of fifths.



I realized that one for the thread. Schoenberg would have none of that.


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## Keytarist (Aug 15, 2010)

SchecterWhore said:


> I wonder sometimes whether the shortness of many atonal pieces helped in eliminating predictability. I've heard of the brevity of Webern's compositions cited as a reaction to Romantic excess, but from a psychological standpoint, it seems that the elimination of (harmonic) cadence would follow the elimination of any sort of buildup.


Ok. But I don't get too much how to work without cadences. I believe that every music has got cadences, even if you work only with rhythm, because the cadence is a section that concludes an idea. Or you mean a music that is 'non stop' until the end?. Maybe one could achieve that by starting every new phrase/idea in conjunction with the last one; like a chain. It is like that the last note works also as the first one of the next phrase/idea, so it never stops.
This is the stuff I'm digging into composition. My next one will be inspired in atonalism, but at the moment I have only finished dumb compositions akin to a gore/horror soundtrack rather than the Second Viennese School.


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Aug 15, 2010)

Keytarist said:


> Ok. But I don't get too much how to work without cadences. I believe that every music has got cadences, even if you work only with rhythm, because the cadence is a section that concludes an idea. Or you mean a music that is 'non stop' until the end?. Maybe one could achieve that by starting every new phrase/idea in conjunction with the last one; like a chain. It is like that the last note works also as the first one of the next phrase/idea, so it never stops.
> This is the stuff I'm digging into composition. My next one will be inspired in atonalism, but at the moment I have only finished dumb compositions akin to a gore/horror soundtrack rather than the Second Viennese School.



Which is why I parenthesized "harmonic" cadences. 

Most atonal music that I have heard does make effective use of rhythmic cadence. And, in Indian classical music, where there is no concept of chord progression, rhythmic cadence is an extremely developed technique. I'm just saying that without the harmonic breaks that we find in tonal music, a piece has to create a flow otherwise. In the case of serial atonality, I don't think I know of any hour-long symphonic works, which I think is a function of the serial dodecaphony itself.


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## All_¥our_Bass (Aug 15, 2010)

http://www.sevenstring.org/forum/ja...nd-fingerstyle/102650-the-12-tone-thread.html


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## Keytarist (Aug 15, 2010)

^^ The 12-Tone thread is pretty cool. 



SchecterWhore said:


> Which is why I parenthesized "harmonic" cadences.
> 
> Most atonal music that I have heard does make effective use of rhythmic cadence. And, in Indian classical music, where there is no concept of chord progression, rhythmic cadence is an extremely developed technique. I'm just saying that without the harmonic breaks that we find in tonal music, a piece has to create a flow otherwise. In the case of serial atonality, I don't think I know of any hour-long symphonic works, which I think is a function of the serial dodecaphony itself.



Gotcha!. 

Beside learning the theory, the best thing is to analyze scores from the Second Viennese School, lets see if it is possible to clear the mystery behind the great works!.


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Aug 16, 2010)

This is an excellent video that walks through Webern's Symphony op. 21. Make sure your annotations are on.



You can get a sense of how calculated his music is. It really is interesting, in analysis.


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## Keytarist (Aug 18, 2010)

Ok. I will watch it with full attention. I have String Quartet Op.28 by the same composer as a task in queue.


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