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In the last part I used a twelvetone row played forward and backwards so the two rows together form one symmetrical row of 24 notes. Then I generated nine new rows, using a special system I designed myself. The eleventh row, played towards the end together with some other, unrelated musical material – mainly to prevent the piece from dying out with only one instrument playing – is identical to the first.
I’m not sure if it qualifies as serial music, but it’s pretty close.
Thanks refugee, I've listened a few times and really like it. The structure you created for the ending brings up a good point. Schoenberg's original description of this approach was "Method of composing with 12 tones which are only related to one another". The strict rules that define serialism came later - possibly by one of his students? Anyway, it always seemed to me that a fun approach would be to limit a 12 tone composition to a small set of tone rows rather than grabbing several of the matrix. Why? Because by limiting yourself to a few rows, you then give some kind of harmonic framework for the piece. Not as highly structured as composing a mostly diatonic piece in a specific key, but a repeating framework made up of certain intervals appearing in the tone row nonetheless. Theoretically, the ear should begin to connect the dots of these oft appearing intervals...theoretically anyway!
And even if your piece doesn't strictly qualify as serial music, you're in good company as Schoenberg once said, "My works are twelve tone COMPOSITIONS, not TWELVE TONE compositions"
Joined: November 20 2006
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Posted: October 29 2013 at 17:42
Thanks for listening! I’m glad you liked it.
Boulez often uses less than twelve tones for his rows, so there are many ways of doing it. You don’t have to be schematic. One of the main goals is to escape tonality, the feeling of a tonic, a dominant, a subdominant etc. You can do that without obeying all the rules (and then it’s possible more correct to call it free-tonal music, at least that’s what we do in Norwegian). Maybe Webern was the strictest of them? I’m not sure. On second thoughts, I don’t think so.
I just remembered one more thing: I made sure that the harpsichord part accompanying the fugal theme in the start of the second part contained all twelve notes. It’s still strictly tonal.
He say nothing is quite what it seems;
I say nothing is nothing
(Peter Hammill)
In the last part I used a twelvetone row played forward and backwards so the two rows together form one symmetrical row of 24 notes. Then I generated nine new rows, using a special system I designed myself. The eleventh row, played towards the end together with some other, unrelated musical material – mainly to prevent the piece from dying out with only one instrument playing – is identical to the first.
I’m not sure if it qualifies as serial music, but it’s pretty close.
Thanks refugee, I've listened a few times and really like it. The structure you created for the ending brings up a good point. Schoenberg's original description of this approach was "Method of composing with 12 tones which are only related to one another". The strict rules that define serialism came later - possibly by one of his students? Anyway, it always seemed to me that a fun approach would be to limit a 12 tone composition to a small set of tone rows rather than grabbing several of the matrix. Why? Because by limiting yourself to a few rows, you then give some kind of harmonic framework for the piece. Not as highly structured as composing a mostly diatonic piece in a specific key, but a repeating framework made up of certain intervals appearing in the tone row nonetheless. Theoretically, the ear should begin to connect the dots of these oft appearing intervals...theoretically anyway!
And even if your piece doesn't strictly qualify as serial music, you're in good company as Schoenberg once said, "My works are twelve tone COMPOSITIONS, not TWELVE TONE compositions"
This made me way more excited to attempt an approach on this.
Joined: January 11 2012
Location: Columbus&NYC
Status: Offline
Points: 3167
Posted: October 29 2013 at 17:49
refugee wrote:
Thanks for listening! I’m glad you liked it.
Boulez often uses less than twelve tones for his rows, so there are many ways of doing it. You don’t have to be schematic. One of the main goals is to escape tonality, the feeling of a tonic, a dominant, a subdominant etc. You can do that without obeying all the rules (and then it’s possible more correct to call it free-tonal music, at least that’s what we do in Norwegian). Maybe Webern was the strictest of them? I’m not sure. On second thoughts, I don’t think so.
I just remembered one more thing: I made sure that the harpsichord part accompanying the fugal theme in the start of the second part contained all twelve notes. It’s still strictly tonal.
Hey you're pretty legit with the notation organizations. I enjoy this song you made.
Joined: November 20 2006
Location: Greece
Status: Offline
Points: 7026
Posted: October 29 2013 at 18:03
Thanks, Smurph! And if I may be so bold, I will recommend anyone who hasn’t yet read Dr. Faustus by Thomas Mann to read the novel. The system the fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn develops is based on Schoenberg’s system.
He say nothing is quite what it seems;
I say nothing is nothing
(Peter Hammill)
In the last part I used a twelvetone row played forward and backwards so the two rows together form one symmetrical row of 24 notes. Then I generated nine new rows, using a special system I designed myself. The eleventh row, played towards the end together with some other, unrelated musical material – mainly to prevent the piece from dying out with only one instrument playing – is identical to the first.
I’m not sure if it qualifies as serial music, but it’s pretty close.
Thanks refugee, I've listened a few times and really like it. The structure you created for the ending brings up a good point. Schoenberg's original description of this approach was "Method of composing with 12 tones which are only related to one another". The strict rules that define serialism came later - possibly by one of his students? Anyway, it always seemed to me that a fun approach would be to limit a 12 tone composition to a small set of tone rows rather than grabbing several of the matrix. Why? Because by limiting yourself to a few rows, you then give some kind of harmonic framework for the piece. Not as highly structured as composing a mostly diatonic piece in a specific key, but a repeating framework made up of certain intervals appearing in the tone row nonetheless. Theoretically, the ear should begin to connect the dots of these oft appearing intervals...theoretically anyway!
And even if your piece doesn't strictly qualify as serial music, you're in good company as Schoenberg once said, "My works are twelve tone COMPOSITIONS, not TWELVE TONE compositions"
This made me way more excited to attempt an approach on this.
Cool Smurph, give it a try! It's lots of fun...you'll be amazed at what you can come up with
For anyone else wanting to give it a whirl, these days I use a freeware music composition/notation tool called MuseScore. It's easy to put 12 tone (or any) compositions together, print out the sheet music, convert it to a standard midi file to load on many synth sequencers, etc...http://musescore.org/
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Posted: October 29 2013 at 19:02
I currently use Guitar pro 5 but it makes it way easier to write out guitar tablature instead of music so I've gotten used to it but this program looks cool! I'll try it out.
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Posted: October 29 2013 at 21:00
Dean wrote:
The row is a specific ordering of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale (without regard to octave placement).
No note is repeated within the row.
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).
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).
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Posted: October 29 2013 at 21:28
infocat wrote:
Dean wrote:
The row is a specific ordering of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale (without regard to octave placement).
No note is repeated within the row.
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).
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
Is that music or is it math?
A little of both, really. Constructing the matrix is actually fun to me, like doing a big sudoku puzzle. I don't really have an ear for serial works though.
In this class I'm taking now, I had to write a serialist piece. My goal was to make as consonant a row as possible, and it sort of worked. The trick was to employ a lot of motion by 3rds/6ths.
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Posted: October 29 2013 at 23:36
Smurph wrote:
I currently use Guitar pro 5 but it makes it way easier to write out guitar tablature instead of music so I've gotten used to it but this program looks cool! I'll try it out.
The current MuseScore release (1.3 I think) is great but the upcoming release includes tab in about 15 different variations (guitar/bass/mandolin/etc) and has this cool feature where you can link the tab staff to the standard notation staff. You can enter the note in either staff and it will display in both...you can also alter the tab staff to understand alternate tunings. It's currently in beta test and anyone can d'load the beta version as well as the proper 1.3 release. They also have an excellent forum that the developers moderate
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Posted: October 30 2013 at 01:21
The.Crimson.King wrote:
irrelevant wrote:
Can't I sum up my thoughts at under a paragraph? I just wanted to say that the compositional technique is not one I'm a fan of. A bit useless to the thread, I know, but I make up for it with the mentioning of Blotted Science (12 tone instrumental prog death metal).
I've never heard of Blotted Science before but your description of "12 tone instrumental prog death metal" was irresistible. Just checked this out and was blown away...it's clearly not serial music (and doesn't follow the highly structured rules) but definitely sounds 12 tone to my ears. And the video is HP Lovecraft's worst nightmare...and just in time for Halloween.
Thanks irrelevant, you made my day
Also found this amazing youtube where Blotted Science guitarist Ron Jarzombek demonstrates how he used the 12 tone composition approach to create the Cretaceous Chasm song in the above video. It's a fascinating view into one musician's approach into 12 tone composition...enjoy!
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Posted: October 31 2013 at 08:54
The Pessimist wrote:
irrelevant wrote:
Dean wrote:
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.
I know your user name is "irrelevant" but I now wonder what you are doing in this thread if it is not to troll.
Can't I sum up my thoughts at under a paragraph? I just wanted to say that the compositional technique is not one I'm a fan of. A bit useless to the thread, I know, but I make up for it with the mentioning of Blotted Science (12 tone instrumental prog death metal).
"Why have rules."
I might add that all rules are in art are a way of understanding music logically. You can't understand music without limiting yourself. Limiting yourself creates parameters to work without, and if those parameters were not there then you'd be confused by the infinite number of options. I don't know whether you compose music or not, but if you do then you abide by rules, even if you don't know about it. I hear a lot of folk say "If it sounds good then it sounds good." Well, it sounding good is a rule. Also, rules derive from what sounds good or not.
Regarding serialism, it relies heavily on logic and structure. It's mathematical. Shoenberg actually said it was LESS free than tonal music, and the reason being that serialism doesn't have a tonic reference point. In its place you have to create structure out of the atonalism, which is where Arnold's techniques come in. Rhythm also plays a major part in this.
They aren't "rules", because... well, you can do what the hell you like. Whether it's good or not however depends on the presence of logical structure.
Quite right regarding rules, and I do write music myself (the link in my sig will take you to my Bandcamp page). What I meant was I don't really see the point in those compositional guidelines (restrictions on repeating notes for example). All power to ya if you wanna compose 12 tone music, it can sound cool, and it's interesting.
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Posted: October 31 2013 at 09:05
The.Crimson.King wrote:
irrelevant wrote:
Can't I sum up my thoughts at under a paragraph? I just wanted to say that the compositional technique is not one I'm a fan of. A bit useless to the thread, I know, but I make up for it with the mentioning of Blotted Science (12 tone instrumental prog death metal).
I've never heard of Blotted Science before but your description of "12 tone instrumental prog death metal" was irresistible. Just checked this out and was blown away...it's clearly not serial music (and doesn't follow the highly structured rules) but definitely sounds 12 tone to my ears. And the video is HP Lovecraft's worst nightmare...and just in time for Halloween.
Joined: January 11 2012
Location: Columbus&NYC
Status: Offline
Points: 3167
Posted: October 31 2013 at 09:29
irrelevant wrote:
The.Crimson.King wrote:
irrelevant wrote:
Can't I sum up my thoughts at under a paragraph? I just wanted to say that t<span style="line-height: 1.2;">he compositional technique is not one I'm a fan of. A bit useless to the thread, I know, but I make up for it with the mentioning of Blotted Science (12 tone instrumental prog death metal). </span>
I've never heard of Blotted Science before but your description of "12 tone instrumental prog death metal" was irresistible. Just checked this out and was blown away...it's clearly not serial music (and doesn't follow the highly structured rules) but definitely sounds 12 tone to my ears. And the video is HP Lovecraft's worst nightmare...and just in time for Halloween.
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Posted: October 29 2013 at 16:40
12 Tone Serial Music Composers
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refugee wrote: