Can You Make Pleasant Music Using the Twelve Tone Technique?
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- āđāļāļĒāđāļāļĢāđāđāļĄāļ·āđāļ 27 āļ.āļ. 2024
- The Twelve Tone Technique was a composition method originally developed by avant-garde composers with the goal of steering away from traditional tonality. Which is why I decided to steer it back towards it ð
If you want to learn more about the Twelve Tone Technique and how it works, check out this amazing video by Music Matters: âĒ Twelve Tone Technique ...
Pixel art created by: / @hiveknight7416
Timestamps
0:00 hello :)
0:41 what is the twelve tone technique?
1:51 Le roi et l'oiseau
3:55 outro
Actual description:
In my senior year of high school, I learned about the Twelve Tone Technique while studying at the Royal Conservatory of Music and thought it would be fun to try to use it in my own compositions. So I ended up writing a set of 12 pieces titled "Le roi et l'oiseau," named after the French animated film the composition was based on, all of which were created using this very technique.
Although the atonality I achieved for the majority of the 12 pieces was desirable, I wanted one particular piece within the set to actually be harmonious and relatively tonal to the ear. However, I had to stick with using the Twelve Tone Technique unless I wanted to defeat the entire purpose of the composition. So I thought, would it be possible to still use the Twelve Tone Technique and come up with something that actually sounds nice? (no offense, Schoenberg)
In this video, we dive into that question, but not before a brief explanation of the workings of the composition method itself. Using the very same piece I wrote back in high school, we explore the viability of using this technique when attempting to write good-sounding music, for lack of a better word (Schoenberg, I apologize for everything I've done).
We had a lot fun making this video so we really hope you had fun watching it!
See you in the next video!
The MiiYoo Team âĪïļ
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This is the only way 12-tone music should be written.
This is a cool idea, however it definitely defies the purpose of even using 12 tone technique, as putting a tone row into a diatonic framework places emphasis on specific notes more than others due to how diatonicism works.
Yes, but the 12 tone technique was never that rigid, it didn't have that much of a "point"... Alban Berg used a lot of consonant rows with diatonic chords
@@gon9684not really. A lot of Berg is based off of consonant intervals such as 5th and 3rds, but they are not in a diatonic setting. Take the violin concerto which is based off of the circle of fifths. It is very consonant and also not diatonic. This is because what maestro theory said is right and Berg knows this.
@@tylers9006 The question is what diatonic means in a musical language that, even when using more traditionaly rooted tonality, shifts the key-center every few beats, sometimes multiple times in a measure. Also, because of rhythm and meter as well as note-lenght, there will always be more emphasis on specific notes of the row, but this can be worked around by highlighting different notes each time the row is used in the melody.
There is a radio-broadcast of SchÃķnberg presenting the technique and harmonizing a row in traditional functional harmony (to prove he was not simply unable to write "normal" music). He also continued to write tonal music as well as atonal later.
The "point" of a row was not to ensure atonality in the first place, but to provide a material "stem-cell" ("urzelle"), out of which the whole music grows. This is a philosophic concept that SchÃķnberg took from multiple sources, from Goethes biological theories (he believed that every organism was made up of fundamental building blocks akin to matter itself) to the musical concept of "motivische Arbeit" that he derived from Mozart and Brahms. So while I think that Berg is maybe not a good example, I agree that the 12 tone technique was never that rigid. SchÃķnberg even broke the row multiple times when he thought it would simply sound better to have a different pitch at a specific point. Lastly, I don`t think that "defying the purpose" is anything of relevance here, especially as SchÃķnberg was himself very averse to strict rule-adherence, even if this is kind of contradictory to his other aesthetic ideas.
Alban Berg and Luigi Dallapiccola made beautiful pleasant music with the twelve tone technique.
Definitely!
I also enjoy spelling out specific chords in my tone rows. One fun thing to do is to open with a major chord, and then make the last four notes spelling out the dominant chord a half step above that, in order to use tritone substitution so that the lack of tonal center also can feel like it leads into something
I have to say...your young composition was in fact a pleasure to hear. Having said that, I'm not sure that 12 tone practice coming back like it was in the 1950's would be a good thing, unless EVERY composer heeded your advice in this video and made it a point to be listenable like you did. (Berg was good at doing what you're showing here too-think of the Violin Concertos row, etc). But all in all, you made a convincing case for adopting the technique as just another tool in our composers toolbelt!
the distinction between consonant and dissonant is like, a matter of opinion :D
Great video! With this quality I'm sure you'll go really far.
The 12-tone technique was developed and subsequently followed by more avant garde techniques that disregarded the communication aspect of music as a language, the connection of which was not proven until about 26 years ago via fMRI brain scan studies. Such techniques are roughly equivalent to randomly stringing words together; the novelty quickly wears off as the listener's brain fatigues due to the difficult task of trying to construct a relational linguistic communication where none exists.
Hence my modern state-of-the-art definition of music:
Music is non-verbal sonic linguistic communication created directly or indirectly by humans.
Definition created by Don Orfeo, 2017
Wow the video quality, and the way you explained everything made me think you have like millions of subscribers! Great job, keep it upâĪ
Here's the tonal twelve-tone row I came up with prior to deserting music school in 1970 because I was disenchanted with avant garde:
C---B-GABb--AbGb---F-DEEb-Db---.
I have to say that creating a row spelling diatonic triads is not allowed in 12 tone technique, but still, a little rule break which allows you to be pleasing is acceptable (maybe)
Is it really not normally allowed?
@@brodieainsworth4901point of creating 12-tone rows is to reduce the significance of any single note, thus erasing tonicity. Adding diatonic triads to this structure is thus not allowed.
Truth is that even first of all music is about breaking rules and even Anton Webern broke those rules.
I do like to use that way of writing 12 tone, or using the row as a progression as a series of root movements. Great video!
I think you would enjoy the Swedish song _Du som gick fÃķre oss_ which is a 12-tone melody that's actually part of their Christian song book (psalmboken) - it's based on the same premise of making a tonal 12-tone piece, and IMO it does a pretty good job, e.g., listen to the Voces8 version
Great video! Though I remember some serialists allowing for a precedent note to be repeated immediately after its following note, which seems like it could add a lot of flexibility for melodies.
I've only recently got back into writing occassionally as a hobby and easing into that by using serial techniques (more so than "the 12-tone style"), but so far i think my solution for how to make it conventionally pleasant sounding was making more than one tone matrix
I wonder if this would get easier or harder if you had more than 12 notes per octave?
Ooooh maybe that'll be a topic for a future video! However, I'm willing to bet that it would be harder due to the average ear not being accustomed to microtonalities, even though intuitively, you'd think that a higher number of notes would make things easier!
Iâm so bothered that the cover image contains only 10 tones. ð
(C is doubled as B# and same with F and E# which leaves B and F missing)
Haha the accidentals beside the B and E are actually naturals, not sharps - sorry that wasn't clear in the image ð
2:16 whyd you say the name of a Danish short story in French, while speaking English? hehe
well ya now, using those twelve note is already a scale, those are only 12 notes foe each octave, 12 out of an infinite number of notes
Lemme try to make something that sounds good without using conventional harmony.
Oh hey, Impressionism.
I disagree with the idea that the technique was not intended to be pleasant to the ear. SchÃķnberg was convinced that over time, people would find this music as beatiful and pleasurable as the music of Mozart for example. This clearly hasn`t happened so far, but that doesn`t change SchÃķnbergs intentions.
The intentions are as good as the results. That hasn't happened and will never happen because it's just extremely unpleasant music.
@@d_rivadeneyra String Quartet no 3 is quite pleasant.
I too have tried inventing methods to write "tonal" twelve-tone music - My solution eventually settled on writing series in such a way, each tetracord have notes I can use as tonic, subdominant and dominant in a given tonality, either them being the traditional 1st, 4th and 5th degrees or accounting for the possible substitution of the latter two with notes of the same dimished seventh (i.e.: first tetrachord starts on C, second contains F, third one G; I'll write the rest of them in such a way the inversion, which will start on C too, can contain either an F, an Ab, a B or a D in its second tetrachord and a G, a Bb, a C# or an E in its third one; retrogradations also have to work in a similar way).
Eventually works, but given SchÃķnberg wanted to achieve complete atonality with his method using it in a tonal way sounds a bit like kidding him to me ðð.
Does the technique particularly matter? Bach wrote highly-structured music, but the music always came first. Composers in 9th century Korea wrote highly-structured music, but it sounds like a free-for-all to Western ears. Both Bach and 9th century Korean composers wrote music, and we remember them not because of the framework within which they wrote, but because the music spoke for itself.
Interesting to know! I guess you are right, one could very much have listened to the piece at the start of this video without knowing it was created using a framework enforced by the Twelve-Tone technique. But for viewers who have studied the technique before, or who are at least familiar with it, my aim was to provide a new outlook on the usage of this century-old composition method.
Literally Richard Strauss does this it's not hard to have four major trichords without leaving an extra note at the end. Stop reinforcing conservative musical thinking, dissonant music is also beautiful!!!!
I never said it wasn't :)
THis is cool, but flute and second violin parts are too boring. Why not to add some melodic lines to them? Maybe even some polyphonic imitations. It would sound a little sharper, but not empty
Great suggestion! At the time that I wrote this piece (which was quite a few years ago), my primary objective was to simply shape and reinforce the individual chords that constituted the main melodic line (to ultimately create a sense of diatonicism). If I ever find the time to go back to this composition, I will certainly try to incorporate your feedback!
As far as I hate the concept of twelve tone technique, I have to say this is not a piece actually wrote with said style. You just took a series of twelve notes (which, for the way it's written, would have not been accepted as a twelve tone series) and used it as a cantus firmus for the other instruments, in a perfectly tonal context.
However, still pleasant ;)