What is the 12 tone scale?

Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian-American composer who created new methods of musical composition involving atonality, namely serialism and the 12-tone row. He was also an influential teacher; among his most significant pupils were Alban Berg and Anton Webern.

Dusseldorf’s Kraftwerk introduced electronic music to the general population. The band made a name for themselves in the early ’70s in the West German underground scene, but exploded in popularity when they used vocoders and synthesizers to create futuristic, pulsating music.

Varèse is regarded as a huge influence on some of the major composers of the 20th century. His interest in the potential of electronic media for sound production, and his use of new instruments and electronic resources led to him being known as the Father of Electronic Music.

Edgard Varèse

The chromatic scale or twelve-tone scale is a musical scale with twelve pitches, each a semitone, also known as a half-step, above or below its adjacent pitches. As a result, in 12–tone equal temperament (the most common tuning in Western music), the chromatic scale covers all 12 of the available pitches.

In music, serialism is a method of composition using series of pitches, rhythms, dynamics, timbres or other musical elements. … Integral serialism or total serialism is the use of series for aspects such as duration, dynamics, and register as well as pitch.

Twelve–tone music is based on series (sometimes called a row) that contains all twelve pitch classes in a particular order. … Pitch classes are played in order; 2. Once a pitch class has been played, it isn’t repeated until the next row. A twelve–tone row might be used as a theme or as a source for motives.

Schoenberg’s idea in developing the technique was for it to “replace those structural differentiations provided formerly by tonal harmonies”.

The basic premises of twelve–tone music are as follows:

• All twelve notes of the chromatic scale must occur.
• No note can be repeated in the series until the other 11 notes of the chromatic scale have occurred (exceptions include direct repetition of a note, trills, and tremolos)

The first step in creating a piece of serialism is to choose the “series” of notes….3 rules of “strict serialism”:

1. No note should be repeated until all 12 notes of the note row have been played.
2. The order of the series remains the same throughout the composition, except for some allowed changes.

Serialism, in music, technique that has been used in some musical compositions roughly since World War I. … Another pre-20th-century example of serialism is the ground bass, a pattern of harmonies or of melody that repeats, most often in the lower vocal or instrumental parts of a composition.

The most prominent minimalist composers are John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young. Others who have been associated with this compositional approach include Michael Nyman, Howard Skempton, John White, Dave Smith and John Lewis, Michael Parsons.

His style of composition later changed. His music became increasingly dissonant and chromatic in the style of Expressionism. … Some years after the composition of Five Pieces for Orchestra, Schoenberg evolved a new system to replace tonality in his music. This was called serialism .

While the paintings are based on the real world, Impressionists paint the scene as if they had only glanced at it for a moment. Expressionism is directly focused on the emotional response of the artist to the real world, using disproportionate sizes, odd angles, and painted in vivid and intense colors.

Impressionism and Expressionism are both more concentrated on the right tone colour than to follow some rules. But Expressionist music is more dissonant and away from the traditional western music. Also it expresses deep emotions rather than moments as the Impressionist music.

Impressionism was a movement that was quite similar to Realism, in that they rejected the idea that paintings needed to be of “history” and instead chose to capture modern times.

Impressionism (1870 – 1890), which can be considered to be the first of the Modern Art movements, had its immediate roots in the traditions of Realism. … Most Realist artists made sketches or studies to be completed back in the studio, and often used models and other props to help them finalise their works.

“Realism is a manner and method of composition by which the author describes normal, average life, in an accurate, truthful way,” while “Naturalism is a manner and method of composition by which the author portrays ‘life as it is’ in accordance with the philosophic theory of determinism.”

Édouard Manet