Twelve-tone technique

A method of composition that organizes all twelve notes of the chromatic scale into an ordered series and uses its transformations to structure a piece.

Tone row: An ordered sequence of the twelve pitch classes used as the basis of a twelve-tone composition. It supplies the ordered material that the technique transforms and develops.
Arnold Schoenberg: An Austrian-American composer who developed twelve-tone composition in the early twentieth century. He established the technique and composed its earliest major examples.
Chromatic scale: A scale containing all twelve pitch classes within an octave in semitone steps. The technique organizes the twelve pitch classes drawn from this scale.
Alban Berg: An Austrian composer whose music combines twelve-tone procedures with expressive and tonal elements. His works show how the technique can coexist with recognizable tonal references.
Prime form: The original ordering of a tone row, before transposition or transformation. It is the starting form from which the other standard row forms are derived.
Expressionism: A modernist movement that emphasized subjective emotion and often used distortion and heightened intensity. Schoenberg’s move toward twelve-tone composition followed his expressionist works.
Pitch class: A category containing pitches that differ by one or more octaves but share the same note name. Rows order pitch classes rather than fixing each note to a particular octave.
Violin Concerto (Berg): A 1935 concerto by Alban Berg that uses a tone row containing tonal triads and a chorale melody. Its row embeds familiar tonal materials within twelve-tone organization.
Inversion (music): A transformation that reverses the direction of each interval in a melody or tone row. It creates a row form whose intervals mirror those of the original.
Free atonality: A style of music that avoids a tonal center without using a fixed system of pitch organization. It was Schoenberg’s earlier approach before he adopted ordered tone rows.

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