twelve-tone

[ twelv-tohn ]

adjective

, Music.

1. based on or incorporating the twelve-tone technique:

   twelve-tone music.

2. using or advocating the twelve-tone technique:

   a twelve-tone composer.

twelve-tone

adjective

1. of, relating to, or denoting the type of serial music invented and developed by Arnold Schoenberg, which uses as musical material a tone row formed by the 12 semitones of the chromatic scale, together with its inverted and retrograde versions. The technique has been applied in various ways by different composers and usually results in music in which there are few, if any, tonal centres See serialism

Word History and Origins

Origin of twelve-tone¹

First recorded in 1935–40

Example Sentences

Trained in the 1960s and ’70s, an era of heady experimentation in classical music, Dr. Rouse drew on the twelve-tone serialism taught by his professor Richard Hoffmann, the neoclassical principles of pianist Robert Palmer, the rigorous formalism of composer Karel Husa and the avant-garde instrumentation of his private instructor, George Crumb.

From Washington Post

Although the initial response was strong, the composer’s Art Nouveau aesthetic came to seem dated amid the rapidly moving trends of the twenties: twelve-tone music, Stravinskyan neoclassicism, the music theatre of Kurt Weill.

From The New Yorker

Twelve-tone serialism, as Vi Hart explains in an excellent video below, was proposed in the early 20th century to encourage composers to break free of traditional tonality and write music in which no note is more important than any other notes.

From Scientific American

In a Perspectives of New Music paper called “On Eleven-Interval Twelve-Tone Rows,” Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg and Melvin Ferentz detail their computer-assisted path to enumerating the all-interval rows.

From Scientific American

After the Second World War, prodigiously complex systems of organizing music spread to all corners of the globe: twelve-tone composition, its serialist variants, chance operations, and so on.

From The New Yorker