Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Twelve tone advertisment!

It's outdated. It's really ugly to twelve tone music. It's not nice. I don't agree a single word the video speaks of.

Still it's hillarious. If we can't have humour we might as well die:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LACCAF04wSs&

I thought the video was hilarious, but I still love twelve tone music. I saw a royal opera production of Lulu once and it was ultra-awesome.

Me too! I love contemporary music in general, which includes twelve tone music, but still the video is huge fun! (LULU is also stunning, btw ;))

Hehe, twelve tone music is hardly contemporary :P.

In the general mind it remains as such!

Scriabin is contemporary in certain peoples minds, doesn't mean they're not ignorant lol. Contemporary music is music by contemporary composers. Twelve tone music is early 20th century. :P

so, say... can you define if the music by Schnittke, Ligeti, Messiaen, Boulez and... Zimmer is contemporary or not? Just wondering why you keep at it, that's all!

Well its not the most helpful of categorisations really. Contemporary composers write in a huge variety of musical styles, occasionally involving serialism.

Funny!

It could have been worse - they could have divided the octave into even more increments.

Funny you should say that. When I was doing my composition studies, we spent a year on atonal music, pitch-sets and 12-tone serial composition techniques and I got to the point where in several pieces I composed, I was actually frustrated that there weren't more tones to work with! I even played around with microtonal alterations but it became hideously complex and I was told that since not enough instruments could play these notes, I had to go back to the good old 12-tone system.

An interesting example of how romantic serial music can sound very romantic:

Berg piano sonata played by Sura Cherkassky

The Berg Sonata is a wonderful piece, certainly, but not a very good example for your point because it's not serial, it's not even atonal. It's tonal, in b minor, although only barely so.

A better example would be Berg's great violin concerto, which is serial.

Point taken

Yes, the Berg Violin Concerto is a wonderful and deeply moving piece.

There is a serial piece that uses more than 12 incraments, I can't remember what it is though.