Tone row
In
music, a tone row or note row refers to a non-repetitive ordering of the twelve notes of the
chromatic scale. Tone rows are the basis of
Arnold Schoenberg's
twelve-tone technique and serial music. Tone rows were widely used in 20th century contemporary music.
A twelve-tone or serial composition will take one or more tone rows, called the prime form, as its basis plus their transformations .
Initially, Schoenberg required composers to avoid suggestions of
tonality - such as the use of consecutive imperfect consonances - when constructing tone rows, reserving such use for the time when the dissonance is competely
emancipated.
Encyclopedia
In
music, a
tone row or
note row refers to a non-repetitive ordering of the twelve notes of the
chromatic scale. Tone rows are the basis of
Arnold Schoenberg's
twelve-tone technique and serial music. Tone rows were widely used in 20th century contemporary music.
A twelve-tone or serial composition will take one or more tone rows, called the prime form, as its basis plus their transformations .
Initially, Schoenberg required composers to avoid suggestions of
tonality - such as the use of consecutive imperfect consonances - when constructing tone rows, reserving such use for the time when the dissonance is competely
emancipated. Alban Berg, however, sometimes incorporated tonal elements into his twelve-tone works, and the main tone row of his
Violin Concerto hints at this tonality:
This tone row consists of alternating minor and major triads starting on the open strings of the violin, followed by a portion of an ascending
whole tone scale. This whole tone scale reappears in the second movement when the chorale "It is enough" from
Bach's cantata no. 60, which opens with consecutive whole tones, is quoted literally in the woodwinds .
Some tone rows have a high degree of internal organisation. Here is the tone row from
Anton Webern's
Concerto:
If the first three notes are regarded as the "original" cell, then the next three are its retrograde inversion , the next three are retrograde , and the last three are its inversion . A row created in this manner, through variants of a trichord or tetrachord called the generator, is called a
derived row. The tone rows of many of Webern's other late works are similarly intricate.
A literary parallel of the tone row is found in
Georges Perec's poems which use each of a particular set of letters only once.
Tone row may also be used to describe other musical collections or scales such as in Arab music.
See also
- musical set theory
- unified field
External links
- by David J. Hunter and Paul T. von Hippel
