What Happens If No Note Is More Important? Music Built on a Fixed Order

Western harmony works by establishing a home note and creating tension by moving away from it and resolution by returning, and through the nineteenth century composers made that movement increasingly elaborate, with harmonies remote from the home key, modulations arriving constantly and chords whose resolution was delayed indefinitely. By the early twentieth century several composers were writing music in which no home key was perceptible at all, which raised a practical difficulty, since removing the organising principle leaves nothing determining what should follow what. The twelve-tone method was one answer, supplying a new organising principle to replace the discarded one rather than abandoning organisation, which is what its originator explicitly claimed for it.

The rules are few and strict:

• •The composer arranges all twelve notes of the chromatic scale into a chosen order, which is the row
• •No note repeats until all twelve have been used, which prevents any one becoming a centre
• •The row can be transposed to begin on any note
• •It can be inverted, turning every interval upside down
• •It can be played backwards, and inverted and backwards together
• •That gives forty eight forms of one row, which supply all the material for a piece

The method specifies pitch order and almost nothing else, which is easy to miss. Rhythm, tempo, dynamics, texture, instrumentation, register and articulation are all free, and two pieces built on the same row can sound entirely unlike each other. The row can be presented as a melody, distributed between instruments, stacked into chords by taking consecutive notes together, or run simultaneously in several forms. Composers exploited properties of particular rows deliberately, choosing orders whose segments related to each other in ways that generated additional structure. Later composers extended the principle to rhythm, dynamics and articulation as well, which produced a more thoroughly determined music and which its critics regarded as a step too far.

Following the row note by note is neither possible for most listeners nor necessary, and knowing what to attend to instead makes the music considerably more approachable. Intervals carry the identity, since a row has a characteristic shape that recurs whatever the transposition, and a listener picks up that shape as a contour long before identifying any pitch. Texture and gesture do a great deal of the work, with the contrast between a sustained line and a scatter of short notes being audible immediately. Repetition exists, since a row returns constantly in one form or another. Register matters, as composers frequently keep particular notes in fixed octaves so they recur at the same height. Treating it as a piece with moods and shapes rather than as a puzzle is what its composers actually asked for.

The method has been contested continuously since it appeared and the arguments are worth stating fairly. Its advocates hold that it supplied genuine coherence, that the audible results are structured whether or not a listener can follow the row, and that a great deal of important music was written with it. Its critics hold that the organising principle is not perceptible to listeners, which makes it a compositional scaffold rather than a musical structure, and that the results are difficult in a way that limited the audience severely. The historical outcome is that the method dominated academic composition for several decades after 1945, provoked a substantial reaction, and is now one technique among many rather than a programme anybody is required to follow.

Arranging all twelve notes in a fixed order and using no note twice until all have sounded prevents any one becoming a home, which replaced the organising principle late romantic harmony had exhausted. Transposition, inversion and reversal give forty eight forms of one row. The method fixes pitch order and leaves rhythm, texture and everything else entirely free.