GRGR(28) Tone Row

[Jeremy Osner]

Here is what my musically enlightened brother has to say about the Tone
Row.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Question re: atonality
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 09:30:34 -0500 (CDT)
From: Gabriel Solis <gsolis at artsci.wustl.edu>
To: Jeremy Osner <jeremy at xyris.com>

Hey Jer,

This sounds as though it's tongue in cheek, though I don't know anything
about GR (like what it is).  It may be sincere, in which case it's
pretty
ironic, though unintentionally.  Oh, just figured it out, Gravity's
Rainbow.  No help though, cause I don't know where Pynchon is coming
from
on this debate.  

In any case, the row is a tone-row, an arbitrary ordering of the twelve
chromatic pitches of the octave, say, for instance,
C-E-F-D#-B-A#-F#-G-C#-D-A-G#.  The composer would then use this and
various manipulations of it (Retrograd, Inversion, Retrograde Inversion,
Transposition, plus various parsings and manipulations of the parsings,
and the creation of new consecutions arising from presenting the pitches
in various simultaneities) in order to create pieces that rigorously
avoid
the taint of tonality.  That's the theory, in any case.

The row was originally an invention of A. Schoenberg, and he conceived
of
it, and the serialist system (composition with these manipulations) as a
way of managing and rationalizing previous attempts at atonality.

Because it's such a peculiar theory, the idea of the row has become
talismanic for people who like the idea of arch-modernist classical
music,
but don't know a whole lot about it.  To think of this music in terms of
the row is like thinking that the chord progression is the thing to
focus
on in Mozart.  It's not exactly false, but presents a very limited view
of
the music.  Schoenberg refused to talk about rows, etc. in his music,
because he thought of them as a sort of pre-compositional device that
allowed him to organize and controll the expression that he saw as
central
to his music.  This is not to say that a lot of second-rate modernists
haven't allowed the row, or the set of formal devices that "the row"
seems
to index here, only that for the best serialist composers (I would
include Webern, Berg, Dalla Piccola, and perhaps Elliot Carter here, but 
not a whole lot of others) it's not the focus of the music.

Best,

Gabriel

On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Jeremy Osner wrote:

> Hi Gabe,
> 
> In the section of GR I'm reading right now, two people are having an
> argument over tonality vs. atonality in music. The proponent of
> atonality screams, "You're caught in tonality, trapped. Tonality is a
> game. All of them are. You're too old. You'll never move beyond the
> game, to the
> Row. The Row is enlightenment." Do you know what "the Row" would mean in
> this context?
> 
> Thanks,
> Jeremy
> 
>