Twelve-tone technique
The technique was first devised by Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer,[not verified in body] who published his "law of the twelve tones" in 1919.
Many important composers who had originally not subscribed to or actively opposed the technique, such as Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky,[clarification needed] eventually adopted it in their music.
In the second edition of his book Vom Wesen Des Musikalischen (On the Essence of Music, 1923), Hauer wrote that the law of the atonal melody requires all twelve tones to be played repeatedly.
[11] The twelve-tone technique was also preceded by "nondodecaphonic serial composition" used independently in the works of Alexander Scriabin, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Carl Ruggles, and others.
[12] Oliver Neighbour argues that Bartók was "the first composer to use a group of twelve notes consciously for a structural purpose", in 1908 with the third of his fourteen bagatelles.
[13] "Essentially, Schoenberg and Hauer systematized and defined for their own dodecaphonic purposes a pervasive technical feature of 'modern' musical practice, the ostinato".
[12] Additionally, John Covach argues that the strict distinction between the two, emphasized by authors including Perle, is overemphasized: The distinction often made between Hauer and the Schoenberg school—that the former's music is based on unordered hexachords while the latter's is based on an ordered series—is false: while he did write pieces that could be thought of as "trope pieces", much of Hauer's twelve-tone music employs an ordered series.
"[15] Rudolph Reti, an early proponent, says: "To replace one structural force (tonality) by another (increased thematic oneness) is indeed the fundamental idea behind the twelve-tone technique", arguing it arose out of Schoenberg's frustrations with free atonality,[16][page needed] providing a "positive premise" for atonality.
The technique became widely used by the fifties, taken up by composers such as Milton Babbitt, Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Dallapiccola, Ernst Krenek, Riccardo Malipiero, and, after Schoenberg's death, Igor Stravinsky.
Some of these composers extended the technique to control aspects other than the pitches of notes (such as duration, method of attack and so on), thus producing serial music.
Bradley described his use thus: The Twelve-Tone System provides the 'out-of-this-world' progressions so necessary to under-write the fantastic and incredible situations which present-day cartoons contain.
[21] Rock guitarist Ron Jarzombek used a twelve-tone system for composing Blotted Science's extended play The Animation of Entomology.
While a row may be expressed literally on the surface as thematic material, it need not be, and may instead govern the pitch structure of the work in more abstract ways.
Durations, dynamics and other aspects of music other than the pitch can be freely chosen by the composer, and there are also no general rules about which tone rows should be used at which time (beyond their all being derived from the prime series, as already explained).
Analyst Kathryn Bailey has used the term 'topography' to describe the particular way in which the notes of a row are disposed in her work on the dodecaphonic music of Webern.
Derivation is transforming segments of the full chromatic, fewer than 12 pitch classes, to yield a complete set, most commonly using trichords, tetrachords, and hexachords.
For instance, in some pieces two or more tone rows may be heard progressing at once, or there may be parts of a composition which are written freely, without recourse to the twelve-tone technique at all.
Offshoots or variations may produce music in which: Also, some composers, including Stravinsky, have used cyclic permutation, or rotation, where the row is taken in order but using a different starting note.
"Quiet", in Leonard Bernstein's Candide, satirizes the method by using it for a song about boredom, and Benjamin Britten used a twelve-tone row—a "tema seriale con fuga"—in his Cantata Academica: Carmen Basiliense (1959) as an emblem of academicism.
