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. . . How little [the
dodecaphonic or twelve-tone
principle’s] nature is understood is, unfortunately, evidenced by
abundant
documentation. I shall give only one example of this, on which I stumbled
recently while perusing a very well-known dictionary. My eye caught the
word “dodecaphonic” and I read “composed through the mechanical
application
of a particular numerical arrangement of the notes of the chromatic
scale.”
I need hardly say that “dodecaphonic” means nothing of the sort.
Dodecaphonic
composition is not “mechanical application,” nor is the arrangement of
the notes “numerical” or even what is implied in the word
“arrangement”—not, that is, in any manner that makes
sense. I might even go further
and say that nothing that is implied in such terms can be called
“composition”
in any real sense of the word. I am not, of course, implying that the notes
in the tone row cannot be identified by numbers—the notes of the
diatonic
scale have been so identified for the last two and a half centuries, after
all. Nor am I implying that the tone row itself, and the order of its tones,
is of minor importance. I am merely stressing the point that the tone row
is an organic pattern of sounds and intervals, created by the composer’s
imagination in terms of sound and of the relationships between sounds;
it is a framework of reference the composer establishes for specific
purposes—just as the composer of a larger work decides in advance
the instrumental
or vocal combination for which he is writing. It is in other words the
composer’s ear, not arithmetic and not dogma or theory, necessarily of
an arbitrary nature, that is involved here.
Roger Sessions
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