In his works could now be found such modern compositional techniques as
dodecaphony and punctualism (4).
2 [July 1984]: 101-22), George Perle bluntly articulates this idea by concluding that had Scriabin lived beyond 1915, he would have achieved a Schoenbergian
dodecaphony. This is false, of course, as a great deal of analytical work on Scriabin's late works gives no indication that Scriabin was even remotely interested in twelve-tone music.
With his death at 86 in July, they are among his last and are representative of a final stylistic period in which he abandoned earlier experiments in
dodecaphony and the use of bird song and such like to return to a romantic style reminiscent at times, inevitably, of Sibelius and even more so, perhaps, of Dvorak (though always, always sounding like Rautavaara).
Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany, and Milton Babbitt in the United States were pursuing the most radical extension of
dodecaphony: "total serialism," in which a restricted number set was used to control not only pitch but also texture, timbre, duration, dynamics, and much more.
dodecaphony, or the twelve-tone system, that systematically used all
For many years, every Saturday a few other people and I would go to see Kabelac to study
dodecaphony, serial technique, punctualism, aleatoricism, which was really tough post-graduate training indeed.
4), to atonal elements specific to the 20th century music; he finally used atonalism and
dodecaphony in terms of the folk researcher, for whom folk music had been the source of some aesthetic solutions whose originality and lack of rigor had a liberating role for his compositional techniques.
One rare example may be found in Klaus's speech to the Bertelsmann Foundation in Berlin (Klaus 2008a), in which he metaphorically contrasts Beethoven's Ode to Joy and Schonberg's
dodecaphony. Ode to Joy seems to be too abstract and far removed from reality.
Twelve-tone composition (alias
dodecaphony or, combined with set theory, serialism) was the rigorously 'logical' elaboration of atonality that Schoenberg unveiled in 1923 as the 'method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another'.
This sense of secure centeredness was weakened in the late 19th century by the increasing use of chromaticism (pitches outside the major or minor key in force), and decisively challenged in the early years of the 20th century by a number of factors: the use of new scales derived from ethnic music; impressionism, which treats chords and dissonances very differently than in the system based on major and minor; bitonality (simultaneous use of two keys); unpredictable beat patterns; and especially atonality and
dodecaphony, both of which avoid any sense of key center.
Schoenberg's
dodecaphony and the rejection of tonal hierarchies were the musical outgrowth of this deeper pathology.
A similar situation occurred in the beginning of the twentieth century when, searching for new musical spaces, several composers almost simultaneously discovered atonalism and
dodecaphony.