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Serialism
Early 20th Century Atonal Composers like Schoenberg, Berg and Webern Uses Tone rows Uses compositional techniques of Retrograde, Inversion and Transposition Often for small ensembles |
How do composers make a tone row?
Take all 12 notes of the chromatic scale and put them in an order. Use this order for the basis of a piece of music of music.
Example:
Listen to this tone row:
Can you see and hear that there are 12 different notes. None of them is repeated, and none of the 12 semitones is missing. We call the first tone row used in the piece the Prime row
How do composers use the tone row?
You can transpose the tone row. (Transpose means raise or lower the pitch.) Like this:
In this example every note is transposed up 2 semitones. (A moves up to B, D# moves up to E# etc).
Listen again to Prime and to the Prime Transposed to hear the difference.
You can also invert the tone row. This means taking the intervals and doing the opposite of them. (For example the first interval is going down 6 semitones (A to D#), the opposite of this is going up 6 semitones. The second interval is going up 1 semitone, so the opposite will be going down 1 semitone.) Like this:
Listen again to the Prime and compare it to the Inverted tone row.
You can also retrograde the tone row. This means that you use the notes of the Prime in reverse. Like this:
In the Prime row the last note was G#, and before that was F#. Therefore here the first two notes are G# and F#. In the Prime the first two notes were A and D#. Therefore in the retrograde the last two notes are D# and A.
Listen again to the Prime and the Retrograde to compare them.
