The "rules" of twelve-tone composition (or, don't trust everything you see on teh interwebz)

This video has been making the social media rounds lately: While the Laser Bat is pretty funny, the rest of the video is a mess. It perpetuates many common myths associated with serialism and introduces some new ones. If you have time and inclination, read Joseph Straus's Twelve-tone music in America. It's like, a whole book about this stuff (remember books?).

First--simply put--there are no rules for serial composition. "You can even switch back and forth between two adjacent notes in the row. You just can't go back the note two pitches earlier" (0:49). In all of my studies of serial music, I have never found anything that argues this point. Straus refers to this as the "myth of serial purity" and the "myth of non-repetition" (180-184). Straus quotes Schoenberg, the "inventor" of twelve-tone technique (another myth):

The theorists always fall into the error of believing their theories to be rules for composers instead of symptoms of the works, rules which a composer has to obey, instead of peculiarities which are extracted from the works (182; in Schoenberg's Style and Idea)

"I picked the twelve-tone row at random. I mean, who's going to know the difference?" (1:02). Straus refers to this as the "myth of imperceptibility" (214-218). Straus (and many others) argue that recognizing the row is not the "point" of serial music: the row is simply a convenient method of organizing pitches--nothing else. Many of the most well-known rows are carefully constructed in order to manifest useful intervallic properties. Consider the row for Babbitt's Composition for four instruments

Each trichord (three-note group) of the row is an instance of set-class (014), and subsequent trichords are determined by applying a twelve-tone operator (transposition, retrograde, inversion, retrograde-inversion) to any one of the trichords. The hexachords are self-complementary: each is an instance of (012345). The row can be combined with other forms (T, I, R, RI) and will create aggregates trichordally (read down a column) and hexachordally (consider the first six notes on any two lines):

This clearly is not random and was done with a clear purpose: while a listener (skilled or unskilled) might not be able to pick out row forms, the repetitive intervallic patterns are clearly perceptible.

"And let's pick another row to be the piano part" (1:05). This already violates her first "rule" of serialism: the piano part will likely duplicate a pitch found in the vocal part. Here are the two rows she chooses:

Row 1 (melody): C A Eb Ab B C# A# D G Gb F E
Row 2 (piano): Ab A F A# B G D# D C C# Gb E

Her two random rows (incidentally, the "chance" method of choosing a row has more in common with Cage and his ilk than it does Schoenberg, Stravinsky, et al.) have several coincidental pitches: A, B, D, and E.

"Let's try twelve-tone-izing something else" (4:30). Composers don't write melodies (or take preexisting melodies) and "twelve-tone-ize" them. Composers start with a melody or a row form and explore its potential. A row is not a melody; it is not a prescription for harmony or anything else. It is simply a way of accounting for pitch classes.

Twelve-tone music was not an effort to get away from an implied context: Schoenberg viewed serialism as a logical extension of the emancipated dissonance found in the music of his predecessors (i.e., Wagner). There are even twelve-tone passages in Mozart (if one wants to play such games: see the opening of the development in the last movement of symphony no. 40). The accompaniments that she adds to her "twelve-tone-ized" melodies place them squarely back in the tonal idiom, which, according to her, is what we were trying to avoid. Admittedly, it's a very late-19th-c. tonal idiom, but it's tonal nonetheless. Quite a lot of serial music has tonal underpinnings: Stravinsky and Copland's music for example. George Perle called his system "Twelve-tone tonality." Charles Wuorinen's Twelve short pieces accompany his Simple Composition textbook, which is a bit of a primer on serial composition. The first few pieces demonstrate a strong influence of tonality: diatonic thirds and sixths clearly suggest tonality.

It's also worth noting that serialism and twelve-tone are not synonymous. Serialism implies ordering of pitches (or dynamics, or durations), and can apply to six notes, ten notes, eleven notes, twenty-four notes, etc.

After about 20 minutes of her colorful drawings and rapid-fire ramblings, I gave up. So this post is in reality based only on a partial knowledge of Vi's work. I didn't bother to watch any of her other videos or to look up her biography. One could, I guess, accuse me of blogging about something I know very little about...