Head towards the internet and do a search for Arnold Shoenberg. Listen to some of his music and other composers who use the twelve tone composition technique and you will instantly have opinions. If you’re like many, your opinion will be extreme like or extreme hate.

12 tone composition, also loosely referred to as serialism was invented by Arnold Shoenberg in 1921. In traditional music some tones become more heavily used than others. Remember our discussion of key signature? If a piece of music is in the key of C Major, the note, “C” will be used in that piece much more than any other note with “G” probably being the 2nd most used. Notes like “D” and “A” will feel left out unless the music changes keys to D Major. Notes like F# may never be heard while the music is in the key of C Major.

Shoenberg knew that this unequal emphasis of certain notes is what gives traditional music its “traditional” sound. He wanted to invent a type of music that sounded entirely different than traditional music so he came up with the Twelve Tone Row. The basic principle is simple: You can’t repeat a note until you use the other 11 chromatic notes. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? First you use C, then C#, then D, etc. until you’ve used all of them. Then start again! This simple technique is actually very complicated.

First, we have to construct a row. To make our row, we have to use all 12 chromatic notes only once but we can use them in any order we would like. How many rows do you have to choose from? 9,985,920! That’s a lot of rows but it’s even more complicated than that!

If you were only allowed to play your chosen 12 tone row, that would be boring! There are a series of what Shoenberg calls transformations that we’re allowed to use. We can play our tone row backwards, (called retrograde) we can transpose it up or down as many steps as we would like, or we can “invert” the notes within our row (If a note went up a minor 3rd, we could move it down a minor 3rd instead), if we want to keep our 12 tone composition simple. We can then harmonize our original tone row of choice by using one of our simple transformations.

In actually, these transformations get extremely complicated. There are 48 different transformations when you combine transposition, inversion, and retrograde. (We’re leaving some of the more confusing parts of this technique out of this article so if you do the math, it won’t work out)

By combining different rows using their transformations, you will get harmony. The rhythms you choose are entirely up to you so the way your rows interact with each other is one of the many ways your music becomes unique.

Before you get too excited about learning this complex technique, don’t expect your 12 tone music to be pleasing to the ear in a traditional sense. It will never sound anything like the music you hear on the radio nor will your non-music friends have a lot of positive comments. You’ll hear something like “DUH! Even I could write that!”

12 tone rows is yet another tool in the composer’s toolbox. Play around with it and have fun!