pretend piano: Doug Gallob

During the early part of the 20th century Arnold Schonberg, along with others like Anton Webern and Alban Berg, as part of the 'avant garde' movement, experimented with the idea of making music that didn't have a tonal center (atonal music). One technique they used in their experiments was the '12-tone series', in which each of the 12 tones of the chromatic scale was arranged in a series. Each note was played in sequence and none could be repeated until its turn came up again in the series. In addition to the series itself, their rules also allowed the series to be played in retrograde, inverted, or transposed. The rules are fun and these gentlemen made some amazing atonal music adhering to these rules. I wanted to write a song using a 12-tone series, but was not necessarily bound to atonality. I found a nice series that I pursued with one twist to the rules: I did not actually consider repeating the same note or an octave as having 'left the note' (and therefore did not yet require me to move on to the next note in the sequence). Beyond this one little twist, I believe I followed the "real" rules for a 12-tone serial piece very closely. Hope it doesn't rot your brains.