What is a retrograde of a tone row?

What is a retrograde of a tone row?

Retrograde inversion is a musical term that literally means “backwards and upside down”: “The inverse of the series is sounded in reverse order.” Retrograde reverses the order of the motif’s pitches: what was the first pitch becomes the last, and vice versa.

What are the principles of 12 tone composition?

The basic premises of twelve-tone music are as follows:

• All twelve notes of the chromatic scale must occur.
• No note can be repeated in the series until the other 11 notes of the chromatic scale have occurred (exceptions include direct repetition of a note, trills, and tremolos)

What is the 12 tone theory and techniques?

The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a piece of music while preventing the emphasis of any one note through the use of tone rows, orderings of the 12 pitch classes.

When a twelve-tone row is played backwards it is called?

Retrograde Inversion. the tone row played backwards and upside down.

What is a 12-tone row?

The basis of the twelve-tone technique is the tone row, an ordered arrangement of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale (the twelve equal tempered pitch classes). The row is a specific ordering of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale (without regard to octave placement). No note is repeated within the row.

What music uses 12-tone scale?

serialism
Twelve-tone music is most often associated with a compositional technique, or style, called serialism. The terms are not equivalent, however. Serialism is a broad designator referring to the ordering of things, whether they are pitches, durations, dynamics, and so on.

How is the tone row used in a twelve tone piece?

• The tone row serves as the building block of various manipulations. Most twelve-tone pieces only use one tone row. However, the very nature of the music is developmental, so the row can be transposed, rotated, inverted, presented in retrograde motion, and be inverted while in retrograde.

How is the retrograde inversion of a row created?

The Retrograde inversion is created by writing all of the notes of the inversion in reverse order. One can use modulo 12 arithmetic to describe any form of a row. It can also be used to transform one form of a row to another form.

Where is the reference pitch of a retrograde form?

When the matrix is complete, one can find any retrograde form by reading a row backwards (right to left). One can find any retrograde inversion form by reading an inversion backwards (bottom to top). The reference pitch of the prime and retrograde forms is always in the first column.

How many tone rows are there in the chromatic scale?

Given the twelve pitch classes of the chromatic scale, there are 12 factorial (479,001,600) tone rows, although this is far higher than the number of unique tone rows (after taking transformations into account). There are 9,985,920 classes of twelve-tone rows up to equivalence (where two rows are equivalent if one is a transformation of the other).