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WD_385/ 2007
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 4 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 31.1 x 21.4 | | Size (mm): | 790 x 544 | | Catalog #: | WD_0385 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
Twelve-tone technique -
Twelve-tone technique (also dodecaphony, or twelve-note technique) is a method of musical composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg. Music using the technique is called twelve-tone music. Josef Matthias Hauer also developed a similar system using unordered hexachords, or tropes, at the exact same time and country but with no connection to Schoenberg. Other composers have created systematic use of the chromatic scale, but Schoenberg's method is historically most significant.
Schoenberg himself described the system as a "Method of Composing with Twelve Tones Which are Related Only with One Another" (Schoenberg 1975, 218). However, the common usage at the present time is to describe this method as a form of serialism.
History of the technique's use:
Founded by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg in 1921 and first described privately to his associates in 1923 (Schoenberg 1975, 213), the method was used during the next 20 years almost exclusively by the Second Viennese School (Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler and Arnold Schoenberg himself). 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 (Reti, 1958). The technique became widely used by the fifties, taken up by composers such as Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Dallapiccola 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. Some even subjected all elements of music to the serial process.
In practice, the "rules" of twelve-tone technique have been bent and broken many times, not least by Schoenberg himself. 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:
* the full chromatic is used and constantly circulates, but permutational devices are ignored
* permutational devices are used but not on the full chromatic
Charles Wuorinen claimed in a 1962 interview that while, "most of the Europeans say that they have 'gone beyond' and 'exhausted' the twelve-tone system," in America, "the twelve-tone system has been carefully studied and generalized into an edifice more impressive than any hitherto known." (Chase 1992, p.587)
Derivation:
Derivation is transforming segments of the full chromatic, less than 12 pitch classes, to yield a complete set, most commonly using trichords, tetrachords, and hexachords. A derived set can be generated by choosing appropriate transformations of any trichord except 0,3,6, the diminished triad. A derived set can also be generated from any tetrachord that excludes the interval class 4, a major third, between any two elements. The opposite, partitioning, uses methods to create segments from sets, most often through registral difference.
Combinatoriality:
Combinatoriality is a side-effect of derived rows where combining different segments or sets such that the pitch class content of the result fulfills certain criteria, usually the combination of hexachords which complete the full chromatic.
Invariance:
Invariant formations are also the side effect of derived rows where a segment of a set remains similar or the same under transformation. These may be used as "pivots" between set forms, sometimes used by Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg (Perle 1977, 91–93).
Other:
Also, some composers have used cyclic permutation, or rotation, where the row is taken in order but using a different starting note.
Although usually atonal, twelve tone music need not be - several pieces by Berg, for instance, have tonal elements.
One of the best known twelve-note compositions is Variations for Orchestra by Arnold Schoenberg. "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 (Brett 2007).
2006 Classic Cat - the classical music directory
-www.classiccat.net/dictionary/
twelve-tone_technique.htm
Arnold Schönberg -
Arnold Franz Walter Schoenberg (the anglicized form of Schönberg — Schoenberg changed the spelling officially when he left Germany and re-converted to Judaism in 1933), (September 13, 1874 – July 13, 1951) was an Austrian and later American composer. Many of Schoenberg's works are associated with the expressionist movements in early 20th-century German poetry and art, and he was among the first composers to embrace atonal motivic development.
Schoenberg is best known as the innovator of the twelve-tone technique, a compositional technique involving tone rows. He was also a painter, an important music theorist, and an influential teacher of composition.
Music -
Works and ideas:
To understand why Schoenberg composed the music that he did, it is useful to begin with his own statement: "Had times been 'normal' (before and after 1914) then the music of our time would have been very different."
Schoenberg, as a Jewish intellectual, was passionately committed to the concept of unshaken adherence to an "Idea" (such as the concept of an inexpressible God) and the pursuance of Truth. He saw the development of music accelerating through the works of Wagner, Strauss and Mahler to a state of saturation. If music was to regain a genuine and valid simplicity of expression, as in the music of his beloved Mozart and Schubert, the language must be renewed.
These were the same years when the Western world developed abstract painting and psychoanalysis in the same city. Many intellectuals at the time felt that thought had developed to a point of no return, and that it was no longer possible honestly to go on repeating what had been done before. Between 1901 (Gurre-Lieder) and 1910 (Five Pieces for Orchestra) his music changed more rapidly than at any other time. When he had written his String Quartet opus 7 and his Chamber Symphony opus 9, he imagined he had arrived at a mature personal style which would serve him for the future. But already in the second String Quartet opus 10 and the Three Piano Pieces opus 11, he had to admit that the saturation of added notes in harmony had reached a stage when there was no meaningful difference between consonance and dissonance. For a time Schoenberg's music became very concentrated and elliptical, as he could see no reason to repeat and develop.
World War I brought a crisis in his development. Military service disrupted his life. He was never able to work uninterrupted or over a period of time, and as a result he left many unfinished works and undeveloped "beginnings". After the war he worked at evolving a means of order which would enable his musical texture to become simpler and clearer, and this resulted in the "method of composition with twelve tones" in which the twelve pitches of the octave are regarded as equal, and no one note or tonality is given the emphasis it occupied in classical harmony. He regarded it as the equivalent in music of Albert Einstein's discoveries in Physics, and Schoenberg announced it characteristically, during a walk with his friend Josef Rufer, when he said "I have today made a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years".
This remark, much misquoted and misunderstood, was probably made with Schoenberg's customary wry and ironic humour, referring to the collapse of the dominant political position of the German-speaking world in previous years, and also emphasising his desire to stand with Bach and Beethoven.
In the following years he produced a series of instrumental and orchestral works showing how his method could produce new classical music which did not copy the past. The climax was to be an opera Moses und Aron, of which he wrote over two-thirds but which he was unable to complete, perhaps for psychological reasons. The music ends at the point where Moses cries out his frustration at being unable to express himself. There is little doubt that by this time Schoenberg had come to see himself as a kind of prophet too.
When he settled in California, he wrote several works in which he returned to keyed harmony, but in a very distinctive way, not simply re-using classical harmony. This was in accordance with his belief that his music evolved naturally out of the past. One of his sayings was "my music is not really modern, just badly played."
It is worth noting that Schoenberg was not the only composer (or even the first) to experiment with the systematic use of all twelve tones. Both the Russian composer Nikolai Roslavets and Schoenberg's fellow Austrian Josef Matthias Hauer developed their own twelve-tone systems quite independently at around the same time as Schoenberg, and Charles Ives experimented with twelve tone techniques substantially earlier. However, Schoenberg's system was by far the most important and influential.
Controversies and Polemics:
Much of his work, however, was not well received. In 1907 his Chamber Symphony No. 1 was premiered. The audience was small, and the reaction to the work lukewarm. When it was played again, however, in a 1913 concert which also included works by Alban Berg, Anton Webern and Alexander von Zemlinsky, some of the audience began to shout out abuse. Later in the concert, during a performance of some songs by Berg, fighting broke out, and the police had to be called in. Schoenberg's music had made a break from tonality, which greatly polarised responses to it: his followers and students saw him as one of the most important figures in music, while critics hated his work, on the whole.
The insistent negative public reaction to his and his students' works led him to found the Society for Private Musical Performances (Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen in German) in Vienna in 1918. His aim was not merely egocentric, however; he sought to provide a forum in which modern musical compositions could be carefully prepared and rehearsed, and properly performed. From its inception through 1921, when it ended because of economic reasons, the Society presented 353 performances to paid members, sometimes at the rate of one per week, and during the first two years, Schoenberg did not allow any of his own works to be performed. Instead, audiences in Vienna heard compositions by Stravinsky, Debussy, Bartók, Ravel, Webern, Berg, Hindemith, Franz Schmidt, and other leading figures in early 20th century music.
Schoenberg was said to be a very prickly and difficult man to know and befriend. In one of his letters he said "I hope you weren't stupid enough to be offended by what I said," and he rewarded conductors such as Otto Klemperer who programmed his music by complaining repeatedly that they didn't do more. On the other hand, among those who are considered his disciples he inspired absolute devotion. Even strongly individualistic composers such as Alban Berg and Anton Webern displayed an almost slavish selflessness and willingness to serve him.
Schoenberg's serial technique of composition with 12 notes was among the most central and polemical conversations among American and European musicians of the mid-20th century. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing to the present day, composers such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Milton Babbitt have extended the legacy of serialism in increasingly radical directions, while even composers normally considered opposed to Schoenberg's point of view, including Igor Stravinsky, Leonard Bernstein (in "Mass") and Aaron Copland, began, in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, to explore and incorporate some basic tenets of serialism within otherwise basically tonal frameworks. During the 1960s and 1970s, academic conversation was at times almost completely defined in terms of agreement or detraction from the larger serialism method of organizing musical information.
In recent decades, composers have managed to transcend the serial polemic, but new controversies around Schoenberg have emerged: most notably, since Schoenberg's later music did not strictly or consistently follow 12-tone serial principles, the centrality of serialism to Schoenberg's thought has been questioned. According to the composer and writer Chaya Czernowin, Schoenberg's most significant (albeit insufficiently credited) revolution was not atonality or serialism, but the decentralization of the recognizeable motive as the main source of identity in music composition--arguably a more lasting and widespread feature of avant-garde music of the last century. By contrast, recognizing the diminished importance of serialism in contemporary music history, critics from Pierre Boulez to James Tenney have argued that the overall historical importance of Schoenberg himself may have been overstated.
Extramusical interests:
Schoenberg was also a painter of considerable ability, whose pictures were considered good enough to exhibit alongside those of Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, and he wrote extensively: plays and poems, as well as essays not only about music but about politics and the social/historical situation of the Jewish people. He was also interested in Hopalong Cassidy films, which Paul Buhle and David Wagner attribute to the films' left-wing screenwriters.
©2006 Classic Cat - the classical music directory.
-www.classiccat.net/schonberg_a/biography.htm
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