Dis-Regarding Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Rows: An Alternative Approach to Listening and Analysis for Twelve-Tone Music

Abstract

objection commonly directed at twelve-tone composition is that listeners may not perceive a work's twelve-tone row in its various transpositions, inversions, and retrogrades. This paper considers twelve-tone practice in particular, but its responses to this problem also apply to the twelve-tone music of Webern and Berg, and to a range of more recent music. Schoenberg never explicitly claimed that a competent response to his twelvetone music required the accurate perception of rows and their transformations; he may even have felt that such expectations actually conveyed a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the method. In fact, Schoenberg was rather reticent about discussing the twelve-tone method, no doubt for a variety of reasons.1 His essays and lectures on the method describe it only in basic terms, adducing a few characteristic illustrations from his own works.2 These writings do not promote the method as a theory of any sort, about either the composition or the perception of twelve-tone music: I did not call it a 'system' but a 'method,' and considered it as a tool of composition, but not as a theory.3 Schoenberg discouraged serial analyses of his twelve-tone music, probably fearing that a fascination with the compositional method might eclipse the compositions themselves, lending the serial technique too much importance, as though it were an end in itself. The following remarks from his 1936 essay Schoenberg's Tone-Rows are revealing in many ways: