SHAUN’S CREATIVE ROCK
This month Shaun Baxter looks into the strange but fascinating world of 12-tone music, devised by Schoenberg in the early 20th century.
Shaun Baxter continues his series that aims to improve your rock theory and technnique. This month: the strange world of 12-Tone Rows.
Twelve-tone music (also known as dodecaphony or dodecaphonics) was a compositional device founded by Austrian classical composer Arnold Schoenberg in the early part of the 20th century. The intention was to break away from the traditional hierarchy of keyorientated harmony and was a way of giving equal importance to each note. This composition technique was used extensively by Schoenberg and his students (like Alban
Berg and Anton Webern) and even into the 1950s and ‘60s by such famous composers as Pierre Boulez and Igor Stravinsky.
From a rock guitar point of view, the atonal effects of the 12-tone method of composing is ideal for dark styles like black- and deathmetal. The technique involves arranging the 12 notes of the chromatic scale in any order of your choice. This becomes the ‘tone-row’ or ‘note-row’. The rule is that, once a note has been played, it cannot be returned to until all the remaining 11 notes have been used (although you can repeat it as many times as you like before moving on to the next notes).
In classical music, once the ‘note row’ has been established, it serves as the basis of the music’s melodies, counterpoint and harmony. As well as using the note-row in its original form (known as the prime series), it may also undergo certain permitted transformations: a) Backwards (retrograde) b) Upside down (inversion) - so that a rising minor 3rd becomes a falling minor 3rd etc c) Both backwards and upside down (retrograde inversion).
Twelve-tone music is often referred to as serial music; however, the 12-tone method is just one of several forms of serialism: serialism describes any music that deals with a recurring series of ordered elements. As a style, total serialism grew directly from 12-tone music. Its practitioners, such as Boulez and Stravinsky, saw setting pitches to a series of numbers as only the beginning, and later adapted the practice to determine just about every other musical aspect as well (such as duration, method of attack and so on).
For our purposes, we can try applying the technique to a diatonic setting. When trying to incorporate serialism into your playing within this context, because it sounds so atonal, it is good practice to work at resolving each line by returning back ‘home’ to the parental scale.
Because they are atonal (keyless), each 12-tone idea can be transposed to begin on any note of the chromatic scale; however, it’s worth bearing in mind that some serial lines will sound more consonant than others, depending on the melodic and rhythmic placement of notes that are inside or outside of the key that you are playing. For example, in a particular key, if you construct a 12-tone row whereby any chromatic note is always used as a means of passing towards a scale note, it will sound quite consonant in that key, and will not transpose to other keys quite as well.
This lesson’s solo study could well be the first time that the 12-tone technique has been applied to country music: imagine what Freddie Kruger might play if he were a hillbilly guitar player. The challenge being: if we can make it work in this setting, it can work anywhere.
The chord progression is A7-C7-D7-F7-G7 and, normally, one would be expected to use a Mixolydian scale from the root of each chord; so, during the solo, you’ll see each 12-tone note-row flanked and resolved using notes from the relevant Mixolydian scale over that particular chord.
Finally, you should experiment with your own 12-tone sequences and also remember to use the various transformation methods (inversion, retrograde and retrograde inversion) to generate more usable material from each original idea.
NEXT MONTH Shaun brings us another Mixolydian solo to learn in Creative Rock
THE RULE IS THAT, ONCE A NOTE HAS BEEN PLAYED, IT CANNOT BE RETURNED TO UNTIL ALL THE REMAINING 11 NOTES HAVE BEEN USED