12 Tone Serial Music Composers

irrelevant wrote: Dean wrote: irrelevant wrote: Why have rules?  It is a technique rather than just a set of rules just like Dogme 95 film-making - without the rules it wouldn't be Dogme 95 it would just be film-making - so 12-tone serialism without the rules would be 12-tone atonal music or chromatic music or non-12-tone serialism or just serialism. That said, rules are made to be broken and Schoenberg broke them all the time, however to be "serialism" 12-tones (or any other series of notes) have to be used to create a row or series that is then transformed - this was intended to prevent any single note or sequence from dominating the piece and to challenge the traditional thinking on melody and harmony.   It's a fun technique that makes you think about composition in a different way but if you don't like the rules, don't use them/ It's interesting, no doubt. I've looked up some info on it in the past. I personally would prefer to compose without that technique, that's all.

irrelevant wrote: Why have rules?

It is a technique rather than just a set of rules just like Dogme 95 film-making - without the rules it wouldn't be Dogme 95 it would just be film-making - so 12-tone serialism without the rules would be 12-tone atonal music or chromatic music or non-12-tone serialism or just serialism. That said, rules are made to be broken and Schoenberg broke them all the time, however to be "serialism" 12-tones (or any other series of notes) have to be used to create a row or series that is then transformed - this was intended to prevent any single note or sequence from dominating the piece and to challenge the traditional thinking on melody and harmony.

Give me a period of time and I'll be able to come back with it. I think I need to think about it on a piano level instead of guitar so I need to buy a keyboard real quick.

Once you create your original tone row, generating the 12 x 12 tone row matrix takes awhile and is pretty easy to mess up.  I found a great tool that builds the matrix for you and even prints it out 

Edited by The.Crimson.King - October 28 2013 at 18:13

1. The row is a specific ordering of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale (without regard to octave placement).
2. No note is repeated within the row.
3. The row may be subjected to interval-preserving transformations -- that is, it may appear in inversion (denoted I), retrograde (R), or retrograde-inversion (RI), in addition to its "original" or prime form (P).
4. The row in any of its four transformations may begin on any degree of the chromatic scale; in other words it may be freely transposed. (Transposition being an interval-preserving transformation, this is technically covered already by 3.) Transpositions are indicated by an integer between 0 and 11 denoting the number of semitones: thus, if the original form of the row is denoted P₀, then P₁ denotes its transposition upward by one semitone (similarly I₁ is an upward transposition of the inverted form, R₁ of the retrograde form, and RI₁ of the retrograde-inverted form).

...or so says Wikipedia

HolyMoly wrote: Compare notes?  Which 12 did you use?

Anyone out there into composing 12 tone serial music a la Arnold Schoenberg?  I did a few pieces about 10 years ago and am just getting into it again and would like to compare notes with other composers