Twelve-Tone Technique

Twelve-tone technique is a method of musical composition, developed by Arnold Schoenberg in the early 1920s, in which a fixed ordering of all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale, called a tone row, serves as the basic material for a piece. Once set, the row can be used in its original order, reversed, inverted, or both, and transposed to different starting pitches, but every occurrence of the row must sound all twelve tones before any tone repeats, so that no single pitch is allowed to dominate the music the way a tonic note dominates tonal music. Schoenberg and his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern used the technique to write atonal music with its own internal system of order, and it became the best known and most widely adopted form of the broader compositional approach called serialism.