Twelve-tone technique
Composition according to Schoenberg's row principle.
What it means
In twelve-tone technique, a fixed sequence of all twelve chromatic notes forms the material of a piece. This row is not used as a melody but as a stock from which melodic writing, accompaniment, and chords are obtained. Because every note occurs equally often, no reference note and no key arise. The German name and the designation dodecaphony mean the same thing.
Musical use
The row appears in four basic shapes — prime, retrograde, inversion, and retrograde inversion — and can be transposed to each of the twelve degrees. From these shapes the whole work is built; often sub-sections of the row are treated as groups and combined with one another. The technique arose in the 1920s as an answer to the dissolution of tonality: it was meant to give free atonality an order that secures the coherence of a work. Its influence reaches far; even composers who did not adopt it have had to position themselves in relation to it. After 1945 the principle was extended, in serial music, to further parameters.
Other names
Dodecaphony is the internationally used, Greek-formed designation. It means the same method, developed by Arnold Schoenberg, of composing with twelve notes related only to one another.
Performance practice
Get an overview of the row shapes used; recognizing an inversion or a retrograde makes connections audible that would otherwise stay hidden. Practise difficult interval sequences with reference notes and work deliberately on intonation, since harmonic supports are absent. Count consistently. Shape phrases, articulation, and dynamics as carefully as in tonal music — the technique concerns the material, not the expression.
Bear in mind that the technique is no prescription for performance: phrasing, articulation, dynamics, and timbre are shaped here just as in tonal music, and a deliberately dry performance misses the point. Work therefore on the lines and not only on the pitches. Practise interval sequences with reference notes and count consistently.
Check whether a work divides the row into groups, because the melodic structure results from this.