SERIAL MUSIC IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20th CENTURY

Atonality and Twelve Tone Technique

     Atonality describes mainly music that lacks a tonal center. For the beginning of the 20th century atonal music mainly associated with twelve tone tecnique which is the beginning of the idea serial music with establish of Schoenberg that style of composition. Twelve tone technique aims to ensure that all of the in 12 tone of a chromatical scale any tone cannot be superior than other in the context of tonal degrees, means all 12 notes are thus given more or less equal importance, and the music avoids being in a key.

     Twelve tone technique invented by Arnold Schoenberg in 1921.He described the system as a "Method of Composing with Twelve Tones Which are Related Only with One Another".However, the common English usage is to describe the method as a form of serialism. In twelve tone serialism the basic idea was tone row what refers to a non-repetitive ordering of a set of pitch classes. Every composer that work on twelve tone serialism used specific tone - rows for their compositions.