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Twelve-Tone Composition

33 points by ibobev

by prewett

0 subcomment

I spent a while learning English change ringing, on specially mounted church bells. It is basically an exercise in combinatorics: the "change" is applying the pattern so that the bells ring through all possible sequences that the pattern can do. At first it sounds like noise, but after a couple of years, you do start to notice a certain musicality to it. As I understand Schoenberg, one of his ideas was that you cannot re-use a note until all the others have been used, which is essentially the same requirement that change ringing has. (The bells are heavy and are swinging through their full arc, so you cannot change their order very quickly.) After realizing this, I listened to some Schoenberg and found it much more listenable than I did in college.

by ksaj

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Once in a while, someone uploads a heavy guitar oriented 12-tone composition to YouTube. So far, all the ones I've heard have had a very consistent heavy metal feel to them.
Each person usually has a different "algorithm" and explain how they came up with the riff or song. It can sound quite evil.
The word I've heard for this is Dodecaphony.
Here is an example of one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCL3E0Mh4js

by skywhopper

3 subcomments

12-tone/serialism was a seriously dire period in modern art music. After Romanticism ran its course and maxed out the tonal possibilities of music that attempted to convey emotion, 12-tone came along to provide a rigid intellectual structure to music that had existed in the baroque and classical periods, but had been blown away by the Romantics and post-Romantics.
Unfortunately it also made listening to music a purely intellectual exercise as well, and a painful one for folks who expect tonality to be a part of any music they want to sit through.
Thankfully folks like Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass came along to embrace the rigid structure and intellectual design approach, but to return tonality as a core principle with Minimalism. Art Music was listenable again.

by d--b

2 subcomments

For those of you who want to experience 24-tone composition, listen to Angine de Poitrine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ssi-9wS1so

by drcongo

2 subcomments