Organizing Atonal Material

Hey guys. I've just started a piece in which large sections(not all) will be atonal. Or at least, I will not be thinking in terms of harmony but in terms of completing aggregates. I studied atonal music a bit in school and learned a bit about Webern's, Berg's and Schoenberg's pitch organization but I was wondering if anybody here wanted to throw some neat ideas out there for the benefit of anyone who's just getting into this style. Like me for instance :P......

I've done some stuff by organizing the twelve pitches into four PC(014) sets and derived a tone row by cycling through each pitch set, taking a pitch from each until my row is full.

I'm not thinking about the really obvious retrograde, inversion, rinse and repeat. I was wondering if anybody here had ideas they didn't learn in a classroom they wouldn't mind sharing.

Thanks in advance.

I found this progression by playing guitar and then used it on the piano. I don't know if someone else already uses it or if it has a name since I have very little 'school' training in music. My favorite style of 12 tone is the following.

Starting at C. Use C and C#. Skip half step. Use D# and E. skip half step.Use Gb and G, skip half step. use A and Bb, skip half step to C again.

This style of progression can start anywhere and the remaining notes are used for variations. This is also why I write alot in C-Minor.

These notes sound to me as if they should always go together, but then my ears weren't made right anyway.

Yeah... what you described there was an octatonic scale. Symmetric Dominant to be precise. They are really cool but they are still a (loosely) tonal device. You can find them in a lot of post-Beethoven music.

why insist on the entire 12 tones?

why not cellular music?

however many notes you want (I happen to like between 4 and 7), the entire cell transposed on every note of itself, generating more possibilities. not as restrictive as 12-tone music. can have tonal implications... or not.

also makes it a lot easier to relate it to actual tonal material.

I am not a great fan of music that passes from outright tonal to heavily chromatic 12-tone music. I don't think the two actually coexist peacefully, nor complement each other. at least, not without massive, massive, amounts of foresight and planning and subsequant hard work (cf. Berg violin concerto).

I suppose the only reason for me to insist on all twelve notes is simply because I've never tried it before and it's something I'm curious about. Mainly, I want to see if it's possible for me to bridge my own tonal ideas with atonal ones in order to build my harmonic vocabulary. I'm really interested in the possibilities of fusing tonality and atonality and the extremes of emotion you could theoretically generate.

If you're talking about tonal music in terms of "vanilla-tonal" then I agree with you. I will check out the Berg you mentioned. Although I'm kind of skeptical whenever I hear about one of the atonal guys writing tonal music. They always seem to get it wrong somehow. It's not usually very exciting to my ears.

Thanks for the bit.

I think everyone taking composing seriously should at least try out 12-tone composition -- with and without rows. I think the most important thing is to not let the "system" dictate things your ears should be telling you. If I recall correctly, Webern is quoted as saying something in the lines of "do as your musical hearing tells you to do -- but always know why it tells you so." The system is no excuse for writing boring music.

Another thing with aggregates is that you probably don't want to use too many 12-tone chords (or situations involving the twelve tones sounding simultaniously in general), as they tend to become rather cumbersome with time. For example, Witold Lutoslawski had a wonderful concept of building 12-tone tonality (-- although I believe he composed only one piece using rows). In his later works he used 12-note chords sparingly, and always organized them so, that they were recognizable (-- i.e. so that they were constructed from simpler blocks -- for example consisting of three transpositions of a maj7-chord on top of each other).

I think that anyone composing with 12-tone techniques for the first time shouldn't really take the notion of "atonality" too seriously, as most of the well-known composers of the so-called "atonal" style actually wrote a lot of beautiful harmonic passages -- albeit quite much "crisper" sounding than their precursors, involving a lot of hierarchies between the tones and between the chords. Here we of course end up with a debate on the semantics of the word "tonal" -- whether it should be seen as the classical diatonal system, or as something more broad, involving perceptible harmonical "drama".

It is of course possible to write with out harmonical "drama", if interest is placed in the dynamics of timbre, rhythm, or textures (the granularity of textures, for example, as Luciano Berio did!). And naturally it is possible to compose without any dynamics, but that is something I'm not really into.

Edit: And, as suggested, listen a lot to the kind of music you wish to learn to write. Berg's string quartets op.3 and Lyric Suite are, for example, great pieces of music, regardless of techniques. As are Webern op.21, Piano Variations etc.

Edit2: Now that I think of it, you'd probably benefit from listening to Witold Lutoslawski's Piano Concerto, and possibly also 3rd symphony. The piano concerto is an interesting concept of using 12-tone chords mixed with passages that could be out of Ravel's piano concertos.