Tone row

In music, a tone row or note row is a permutation, an arrangement or ordering, of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale. Tone rows are the basis of Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique and serial music. Tone rows were widely used in 20th century classical music.

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A twelve tone or serial composition will take one or more tone rows, called the prime form, as its basis plus their transformations (inversion, retrograde, retrograde inversion; see twelve-tone technique for details).

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Most composers, when constructing tone rows, are sure to avoid any suggestion of tonality within it - they want their piece to be completely atonal. Alban Berg, however, sometimes incorporated tonal elements into his twelve tone works, and the main tone row of his Violin Concerto hints at this tonality:

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This tone row consists of alternating minor and major triads starting on the open strings of the violin, followed by a portion of an ascending whole tone scale. This whole tone scale reappears in the second movement when the chorale "It is enough" (Es ist genug) from Bach's cantata no. 60, which opens with consecutive whole tones, is quoted literally in the woodwinds (mostly clarinet).

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Some tone rows have a high degree of internal organisation. Here is the tone row from Anton Webern's Concerto:

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If the first three notes are regarded as the "original" cell, then the next three are its retrograde inversion (backwards and upside down), the next three are retrograde (backwards), and the last three are its inversion (upside down). A row created in this manner, through variants of a trichord or tetrachord called the generator, is called a derived row. The tone rows of many of Webern's other late works are similarly intricate.

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A literary parallel of the tone row is found in Georges Perec's poems which use each of a particular set of letters only once.

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Tone row may also be used to describe other musical collections or scales such as in Arab music.

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See also: musical set theory, operation, unified field

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Music: Music is a natural intuitive phenomenon operating in the three worlds of time, pitch, energy, and under the three distinct and interrelated organization structures of rhythm, harmony, and melody....

Permutation: :See permutation (music) for the application of this concept to music....

Chromatic scale: The chromatic scale is any musical scale that contains more than one consecutive half-step (in other words two adjacent pairs of scale degrees or members which are separated by a semitone). However, the term usually refers specifically to the scale that contains all twelve pitches of the Western tem...

Tone row related Images and Photos (experimental)

Row Row Row	Park Row	In a Row	Rotten Row
Franchot Tone	Cannery Row (1982)	The Row Tiree	Row of Leaves
Park Row Leeds	Row of Trees I	Row Your Boat	Desolation Row