12-tone music
- noun
- /ˈtwɛlvˌtoʊn ˈmjuːzɪk/
- Specialized
:
música de doce tonos
- Understanding 12-tone music requires familiarity with the chromatic scale and serial techniques.
Examples
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Arnold Schoenberg is credited with developing 12-tone music as a compositional method.
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Many composers explore 12-tone music in their works.
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Many composers experimented with 12-tone music during the twentieth century.
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Have you ever listened to 12-tone music?
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The composer wrote a new piece in 12-tone music that explores innovative sound textures.
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In her music class, we learned about 12-tone music and how it organizes all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale.
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Many contemporary composers have embraced 12-tone music as a way to express their artistic ideas.
Synonyms
1
9.9
A way of writing music that uses a fixed order of notes
A way of writing music that uses the twelve notes in a set order
A 20th-century style of music that uses a fixed order of notes to build an entire piece
Surface Forms
Morphology
12-tone + music
A B1 learner who knows '12', 'tone' and 'music' can reasonably infer this refers to music that involves or uses twelve tones, so the basic compositional sense is accessible from the parts. However, the term also denotes a specific technical/serial compositional technique (Schoenberg's twelve-tone method) and historical/technical nuances that are not predictable from the constituents alone, so it is not fully transparent.
Etymology
12-Tone music comes from a method by composer Arnold Schoenberg who made a fixed list of all 12 tones, like a musical checklist where each note appears once before any repeat. So, the name came to mean 'a style that uses a set order of all twelve notes'.