Twelve-Tone System

Twelve-Tone System, widely used approach to writing music, developed by the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg. He devised the system between about 1908 and 1923 while searching for a principle around which to organize atonal music (music that avoids a central keynote and all key relationships). The composer first arranges the 12 notes of the chromatic scale in a particular order, forming a row of tones. A composition is then built by using each tone of the row in turn, beginning again with the first tone each time the end of the row is reached. Tones may be used one after another, as melody, or simultaneously, as chords. They may be placed in as high or low a range as desired and given to whatever instrument or voice the composer chooses. The row may also be used in three variations: retrograde (played backward from end to beginning); inversion (played upside down, so that an upward leap becomes a downward leap and vice versa); and retrograde inversion (upside down and backward). The original row and any variations can also be transposed to higher or lower pitches.

Schoenberg's twelve-tone music was often emotional and expressionistic. His students, the Austrian composers Alban Berg and Anton Webern, used the system in striking ways. Berg, whose style was also expressionistic, often combined twelve-tone and traditional tonal elements, sometimes constructing twelve-tone rows that contained (instead of avoided) traditional chords. Webern used the row more abstractly, often splitting it and recombining its sections, and his musical style was based on clarity and conciseness.

The twelve-tone system was the first and most famous formulation of the concept of serialism, which is the most far-reaching innovation of 20th-century music. Serialism is the repetition and variation of a given sequence in any musical element-not only pitch, but also rhythm, tone color, and even blocks of sound or levels of loudness and softness. Among those working with expanded concepts of serial music are the French composer Pierre Boulez and the U.S. composer Milton Babbitt.



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