Year: 2008

Classical serialism typically refers to the 12-tone composition technique developed by Schoenberg and his followers. The basic premise of the 12-tone system is the row, which is an ordered arrangement, or set, of pitch classes. Each pitch class occurs once, and only once. The row has four basic forms: Prime (P): the original ordered set…

To follow up on pitch-class sets, previously talked about in Part 1: First, a clarification that may help you to better understand inversions of pitch-class sets in general. The easiest way to visualize the inversion of a pitch-class set is to start with the top pitch-class member (right-most) of the pitch-class set, and working your…

I started posting this as a comment to Basic Concepts for Atonal Theory, but decided it needed its own life. Important additional comments/clarifications regarding interval terminology: Unordered and ordered pitch intervals are the same except that ordered pitch intervals include  a + or – sign. Pitch-class intervals can never be larger than 11, since a…

Pitch-Class Sets Pitch-Class Sets are unordered collections of pitch-classes. Normal Form. The normal form of a pitch-class set is the most compressed way of writing the set in ascending pitch-class order. Compressed means traversing the shortest interval from first pitch-class to last, and placing smaller intervals first. Transposition. A pitch-class set can be transposed by…