twelve-tone technique

American  

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.

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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.”

From The New Yorker

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

From The Guardian

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

From Time Magazine Archive

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.

From Time Magazine Archive

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

From Time Magazine Archive