Twelve tone technique

[jee_pack]

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_tone_technique

I'm just too curious, I've just started experimenting with the tonal system that I stumble upon this at wikipedia. And I find it interesting, although I don't know if its something that could ever fit my style. My style is that, like most people, my music's purpose is to trigger emotions. I write music for the dance floor, but it absolutly needs to be melodic. It needs to feel like the melody and harmony transport you to a state of mind. Everything needs to flow, be unpredictable but always within the lines on what the song is trying to communicate. Listen to a trance track with no vocals and a great melody, listen to the instrument part of a movie with intense emotions, or listen to a house track with notes that tell a story. However you want to put it, this is what most people who write melodies are aiming for. So there goes the question.

Does anyone know if the twelve tone technique is even worth investigating? Can any sort of dance-floor music be made using this technique, or would it not fit with anything else lets a Dj wanted to put it in his set? Or would the human ear just not see this as a dance-frendly flow?

My guess is that there has to be a certain limit to experimenting. At least if you want a specific crowd or group of listeners to enjoy your music or have your music communicate something to people that are used to listening to a certain composition style... But I could be wrong, so I'm asking...

thanks in advance for your input

[Polite Company]

I do not have a lot of personal experience writing using the Twelve Tone method but I'll chip in my two cents.

From my limited experience it seems like twelve tone technique is useful more as an intellectual exercise than an 'musically useful' writing style. One of the reasons the technique was developed was as an attack against the old guard of musical writing.

Its pretty useful if you get stuck trying to write melodies or just need to stimulate ideas but I do not think it will result in widely useful melodies. It would be very unlikely that you could come up with something for use in a dance-floor track as dance focuses on repeating figures while an essential part of twelve tone is not repeating yourself.

Hope this helps.

[Xenakios]

Well, one criticism of the original inventor of the technique (Schönberg) was that he used too simple (dance-type classical art music) rhythms in his compositions... I don't really personally think one can hear much of that really in his pieces...

The eventual progress of classical art music was of course to subject the other parameters of music (rhytms, intensities, orchestration...) also to the same kind of rules as pitches.

-X

[Km7]

I think such experiments wouldn't be very dance-friendly, it is definitely not easy-listening and predictable music. I don't like this technique and serialism at all, it is too mathematically oriented and implies more limits than freedom.
Some people call this atonal, personally, I don't like it (and I think Schoenberg hasn't liked it as well). Absolutely, pure, 100% atonality simply doesn't exist and the more one tries to abandon the natural forces of tonality, the more he risks to make dull music.

[Toxikator]

Honestly 12-tone has its place but it has to be used certain ways. Much like the major or minor scales, it communicates certain feelings, usually of unrest (it has a very "calm-before-the-storm" quality)

[Adaerus]

In my understanding of the 12 tone technique is that it seems to be probabilistic: the chance of a note to apper is equal to the chances of any other note to appear. This looks the same as the description of white noise: the chanse of any frequency to appear at a certain amplitude is equal with the chanses of all other frequencies to appear at that amplitude (or somthing along these lines). In other words it would sound like random notes.

It would be an interesting idea though to try to do dace music but melody would not be one of the driving elements. It would sound at most an experimental work anyway but not in the general sense of dance.

[Km7]

Definitely. And although it is an unnatural method (to me and some other people), it of course communicates feelings and impressions. And that's the idea - accepting all notes as equally important helps to reduce the tonal gravity.

[Toxikator]

Indeed. Though it DOES work on pitch patterns...

Here's a REAL quick mp3 example, using a little tone row down, then retrograde back up, busting into a "danceable" piece. The synth moves to phrygian but returns to the 12-tone ideas during the phrases.

[VicDiesel]

Does anyone know if the twelve tone technique is even worth investigating?

Sure. Even without going hardcore serial you can be inspired by some elements on it. For instance, on occasion I've been inspired to write themes of 10 or 12 different notes. You can be surprisingly melodic with that idea.

Someone posted a tune in the Cafe, maybe a year ago? that used this technique. It was quite melodious, chill-out like.

Can any sort of dance-floor music be made using this technique, or would it not fit with anything else lets a Dj wanted to put it in his set?

Hm. Most dance "melodies" sound almost pentatonic to me. The sort of floating tonality that you'd get probably would be hard to fit in.

But it's worth a try.

Victor.

[eternia]

I think Varadin put it very well when he said that it "implies more limits than freedom". The idea of dumping the dominant "rules" to replace them with a more limiting set of rules based on strict mathematical and logical parameters (rather than musical ones) always struck me as rather obtuse.

As a young composer I spent some time with 12-tone technique. I did find ways to make music with it, but ultimately I didn't find it very satisfying. It did however lead me to experiment with other mathematically-based ideas that did give some quite musical results (eg one movement of my first string quartet is based around the fibonacci number sequence). I eventually came up with my own "rule" that said that the output of all these mathematical manipulations must sound musical to me - not a very complex system but it worked for me.

Having said that, I would think that you could actually come up with some interesting music using this technique (or variations on it)- personally I just wouldn't take the rules too literally. But maybe that was the idea in Vienna - come up with a very restrictive set of rules and see how far you can bend them without actually breaking them - who knows!

D

[Km7]

I believe it is possible for one to come up with some nice melodies with this technique or to use it as addition for variety and effect. Personally, I have worked with it only theoretically and haven't composed any 12-tone music. A while ago, I visited the webpage of an old experienced composer (don't remember his name). He nicely says that there is nothing intriguing and interesting in composing music with such techniques - today, computers can generate it for you.

[rp314]

My basic advice regarding 12 tone music theory:

1. The best way to decide to go through the process of learning compositional techniques is to listen to a significant amount of music in that style and decide whether it's worth the hassle to you. Some folks learn how to write fugues but may never actually use the technique in their own compositions. The worth of doing that sort of thing usually lies in a more complex aesthetic realm.

2. If and when you decide that you want to go ahead and learn 12 tone theory try as much as possible to study with someone who loves the whole thing and attempt to avoid those who were forced to learn it in some stuffy academic environment.

I learned 12 tone theory from a professor who once won a Pulitzer Prize and what generally made it more fun was the joy that he found in music that some still consider uninteresting almost a century after it all got started.

[jee_pack]

thanks for all the info guys, with those responses, I think I have enough to work on in the normal composition method to start experimenting with something like that, my question is answered, I'm not making an opinion of this type of music, cuse I havn't had a chance to listen to any example yet. But I don't think I'll be reading about... anyway for now.... thanks

[Km7]

Or, if you decide to study dodecaphony, the other possibility is to find good and thorough book(s) on the subject, read, think, analyze, listen and practice.

[cron]

Well, one criticism of the original inventor of the technique (Schönberg) was that he used too simple (dance-type classical art music) rhythms in his compositions... I don't really personally think one can hear much of that really in his pieces...

The eventual progress of classical art music was of course to subject the other parameters of music (rhytms, intensities, orchestration...) also to the same kind of rules as pitches.

-X

Indeed. One of the general criticisms of Schoenberg's rhythms is that didn't derive them serially. It's probably because of these rhythms that Schoenberg remains the most well known of the serialists.