Eventually, Berg was to prove his loyalty to Schoenberg, his revered former teacher, by outwardly embracing his
twelve-tone method.
For Brown, the Nachlass, including documents like the Harmonielehre, provides insight into the foundation of his two major developments in composition: atonality and the
twelve-tone method.
Schoenberg's music and thinking have been the focus of scholarly discussion for several decades," Peles said, "and 'Schoenberg's
Twelve-Tone Music' does a masterful job of pulling many of these discursive threads together while tremendously enriching our understanding of this music.
This seems to me a more useful and elastic way of treating the relations between tones than the
twelve-tone method.
The biographical part of the book ends by depicting the two changes of direction in Skalkottas' compositional techniques: his return to tonality from 1947 until mid-1949, and his return to strict
twelve-tone music during the last months of his life (p.
The excavation of Bernstein's
twelve-tone structures, however, belies his rhetoric on serialism (including his famous lamentation at Copland's turn toward
twelve-tone techniques) and disproves the common assumption that Bernstein dabbled in and then dismissed serialism.
Twelve-tone music is never easy, and this strenuous 40-minutes of non-stop singing for soprano accompanied by a lone violin--not to mention the requisite emotional extremes--is particularly challenging.
The
twelve-tone system of music may not be every music-lover's idea of pleasant sound, but it was a revolutionary form of musical expression that has not been rejected by musicians.
Sixteen year olds were asked to compose a sixteen measure composition for four performers in 4/4 time based on the
twelve-tone row used by Berg in his violin concerto.
Schonberg's rigorous
twelve-tone approach was alien to Czechoslovak composers in the great majority of cases, and this was also true of the hermetically compact and in Czechsolovakia virtually unknown music of Anton Webern.
Donald Duck of the mail, and the
twelve-tone row of the adored.
Webern is the most refined, the most complex, the most rewarding of twentieth-century composers, whose short pieces encapsulate the whole history of music in under three minutes, despite being written entirely within Schoenberg's
twelve-tone system .
