12 Tone Music: How to Make Music With the 12-Tone Technique

The twelve-tone technique is a style of musical composition that organizes all twelve notes of the chromatic scale into a series called a tone row. The order of notes in a tone row remains static so that if a tone row progression features the note C♯ followed by D followed by F, they must remain in that order whenever the row is played. This makes twelve-tone music a kind of musical serialism.

Due to the strict nature of a twelve-tone row, twelve-tone music (or dodecaphony) does not have the tonal (diatonic) sound common to other types of Western music. Tonal music is what we hear when we think of Mozart or Beethoven; compared to them, twelve-tone serialism sounds purely atonal. In applied use, twelve-tone compositions never sound like they are in a major key or a minor key. While some notes in tonal music are more significant than others (like the root, the third, and the fifth), the twelve-tone method treats all notes as relative equals.

The twelve-tone technique of twentieth-century music is largely credited to two composers: Josef Matthias Hauer, who described the "law of twelve tones" in a 1919 treatise, and Arnold Schoenberg, who developed twelve-tone serialism as we know it.

• Early years of Arnold Schoenberg: Born in Vienna in 1874, Schoenberg began his career as a Romantic composer who toyed with dissonance. This approach put him in league with other Germanic composers like Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, and Richard Strauss. Schoenberg was at his most popular during his Romantic period, thanks to works like Verklärte Nacht (1899), Pelleas und Melisande (1903), and Gurre-Lieder (1913).
• A musical shift: In the midst of his relative success, Schoenberg began experimenting with new tonalities. This was clearly pronounced in his String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10, with soprano, which he composed in 1908. He proceeded in this direction with Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten (The Book of the Hanging Gardens) in 1909, Five Orchestral Pieces in 1909, and Pierrot Lunaire in 1912.
• Twelve-tone music as a declared artform: By the 1920s, Schoenberg had created his own method for organizing music, which fell well outside the conventions of diatonic harmony. Commonly known as the twelve-tone method, or serialism, it involved all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. Schoenberg arranged notes into tone rows, where each of the twelve notes in a chromatic scale must be played before a note can be reused. Tone rows are used to build an entire composition, much like a subject is used to build a traditional fugue. Works from this period include Suite for Piano (1923), Wind Quintet (1924), and Variations for Orchestra (1928).
• Schoenberg's students and the Second Viennese School: Schoenberg's twelve-tone serialism sounded thorny and dense to many untrained ears, but the music of his students maintained more of a bridge to the Romantic era and its emphasis on melody. Such composers include Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Erwin Stein, Egon Wellesz, Robert Gerhard, Norbert von Hannenheim, and Viktor Ullmann. As one of Schoenberg's most successful students, Berg is best known for his Violin Concerto (1935) and for the operas Wozzeck (1922) and Lulu (1937). Webern is best known for his short instrumental pieces such as Concerto for Nine Instruments (1934) and Variations for Piano (1936). Due to their common roots in Vienna and their shared appreciation for Schoenberg's method, this group was dubbed the Second Viennese School by music historians.
• A major influence on twentieth-century classical music: Schoenberg died in 1951, having actually outlived his two most famous students, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. The deaths of these twelve-tone pioneers did not kill serialism in Western music. Igor Stravinsky, the Russian-born composer who became something of a rival of Schoenberg's when both moved to America, was reluctant to embrace serialism during Schoenberg's lifetime. When the Austrian master passed away, Stravinsky heartily embraced serialism in his own music. As the twentieth century wore on, composers used twelve-tone series more loosely, applying them where useful and discarding them where they were burdensome. This has allowed the technique to live on in contemporary classical music.

Twelve-tone music theory features several radical departures from traditional Western music.

• Equally weighted pitches: Twelve-tone music theory is based on the idea that there are twelve semitones in Western music, and each of them should have equal importance in a composition. This means there is no "root" or "third" or "fifth," and there are no such things as major tonalities or minor tonalities. All notes have the same relationship to one another, which effectively makes twelve-tone serialism a form of atonal music.
• Pitch classes: Twelve-tone composers categorize notes into pitch classes. Each pitch class consists of a single note sounded in various octaves. For instance, the E pitch class is the note E played at various octaves both above and below middle C. E1, E2, E3, E4, and E5 are all in the E pitch class, and the list goes on from there.
• Tone rows remain consistent: In a twelve-tone composition, a composer designs a tone row, where all twelve chromatic notes appear in a chosen order. This order cannot change, although the composer can manipulate the tone row using techniques like inversion and retrograde.
• A piece can have multiple tone rows: Twelve-tone compositions are not bound to a single tone row. If a composer has exhausted the possibilities of a particular tone row, they can move on to a new one. They can also bring back tone rows from earlier in the piece.

Even though the note order of a twelve-tone row cannot change, a composer can do a lot to manipulate a particular serial row. Consider some of the ways tone rows can appear in a composition.

1. 1. Prime form: This is the original tone row where all twelve notes of the chromatic scale get played before any can be repeated.
2. 2. Inverted form: When you play a tone row in inversion, you are inverting the intervals between notes. For example, if a tone row began with the notes B-G-F♯, the intervals in that prime form row would be "up a minor sixth," then "down a minor second." To play those intervals in inverted form, you would start on B, but then go down a minor sixth. You would play the note D♯. Then, instead of going down a minor second, you would go up a minor second. The third note would be E. Again, the prime form starts B-G-F♯. The inverted form starts B-D♯-E.
3. 3. Retrograde form: A retrograde tone row is one that is played in reverse order.
4. 4. Retrograde inversion: A retrograde inverted row form is one that is played both backward and with inverted intervals. To an untrained ear, this will sound quite different from the original tone row.
5. 5. Transposed form: By using transposition, a composer can move an entire tone row higher or lower in the audio spectrum.
6. 6. Unorthodox changes: Arnold Schoenberg was quite strict with his original twelve-tone compositions, but later composers have taken liberty with their tone rows to make them somewhat more compelling to an audience. Some have changed notes within a pitch class (such as shifting the note F♯3 to F♯5). Others have shortened tone rows so that they don't go through all twelve chromatic pitches. Still others will insert a serial tone row into what is otherwise tonal music.

To create your own music using the twelve-tone technique, try using the following method.

1. 1. Create a row in prime form. Start by making your own original tone row. You must use all twelve notes of the chromatic scale without repeating a note. Try to avoid intervals that make it sound like you're spelling out a major triad or a minor triad (although it's okay to sometimes have intervals of major thirds and minor thirds). You don't want to create the illusion of tonality when you're really writing atonal music.
2. 2. Write out your tone row in three other forms. Once you have your row in prime form, write out that same row in retrograde, in inversion, and in retrograde inversion. You will need all four of these forms to make an interesting piece.
3. 3. Begin arranging your tone rows. Try arranging your tone rows in various ways to create something that sounds musical. In addition to the four forms of the row—prime, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion—you can also transpose the row by one or more octaves (which keeps all the notes in their same pitch class) or you can transpose by other intervals to get a whole new set of notes.
4. 4. Create your next tone row. Once you've explored all the possibilities of your first tone row, you can create a new one and repeat the process. The key is making tone rows that have some sort of relationship to one another. Maybe some of the same intervals get repeated. Maybe the starting and ending notes are the same between rows. The choice will be your artistic prerogative as the composer.
5. 5. Remember that twelve-tone compositions are not free atonality. Twelve-tone music is atonal in that it does not have a tonal center. However, it is still a form of serialism, where notes must appear in a particular order. Experts in this method of musical composition will sometimes create their own version of chord progressions, where groups of sequential notes form trichords (three-note chords), tetrachords (four-note chords), and hexachords (six-note chords). This imposes structure on a twelve-tone composition.

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