twelve-tone technique

noun

Music.

1. a modern system of tone relationships in which the 12 tones of an octave are not centered around any one tone, but are unified by a selected order of tones for a given composition.

Example Sentences

There was a time in American academia when, if you wanted to attain a bachelor’s degree in musical composition, you had to display a basic competence in the music of the Second Viennese School—of the composers Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—and with the movement’s signal contribution to music history: twelve-tone technique, or as Schoenberg, its inventor, put it, the art of composing “with twelve tones which are related only with one another.”

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By reputation an expert practitioner of twelve-tone technique, Lieberson had always had a secret yen for sensuous, late-Romantic harmony.

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He is also interested in more stringent twelve-tone technique, and dips into that idiom every now and then.

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In Italy, the land of Verdi and Puccini, Luigi Dallapiccola, 46, is the chief disciple of Arnold Schoenberg's strange-to-the-ear twelve-tone technique.

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One result was that musical ideas could not be fully developed with Stravinsky's twelve-tone technique.

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