After hearing from several people regarding Criterion Improvisations, one thing seemed to be a recurring comment. Many of you reading this blog felt I went over your heads with unfamiliar music lingo.
One of things I mentioned was 12-tone composition. I had mentioned that Toshiru Mayuzumi had composed in this style in the mid-fifties. In this edition of Criterion Improvisations I will attempt to give you a fairly simple explanation of what I meant by this with the aid of some video links you can check out to illustrate my point.
Let’s begin with a musical example. The person who really developed the idea of 12-tone composition was Arnold Schoenberg, who eventually codified it into a new method of composing. He didn’t just have students, he had disciples who included Anton Webern, Alban Berg and Pierre Boulez, to name just a few. Here is Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra Op. 34, written in 1934:
After hearing that, you are probably either convinced to never listen to Schoenberg’s music again or you are at least intrigued about a type of music you may not understand but may want to learn more about. This is music without a tonal center. Did you sense an over-all important note here? Most typical Classical or Romantic music has a tonal center. There is one note the music seems to resolve to. Click here to listen to an excerpt from Mozart:
Did you sense that there was one particular note that seemed to be most important? You don’t even have to know the name of the note to sense this. Usually the last note in a tonal composition is this note or the compositions’ tonal center. In tonal compositions, notes are not part of a democracy but notes are ranked in order of importance. That’s why most symphonies will tell you the key in their title. This was important to understanding the music.
Schoenberg wanted to break away from the idea of a tonal center. He sought to free music from what he saw as a system of the past that was stifling his creativity. Here is a little video bio about Schoenberg’s life that includes some excellent samples of his music.
If you are at all familiar with the piano, you know there are 12 notes: Ab, A, Bb, B, C, C#, D, Eb, E, F, F# and G. Schoenberg sought to make all 12 of these notes equal. No “big cheese” of notes, everybody equal. This may be why when you listened to the above piece by Schoenberg that it may have seemed a bit directionless to you. To try to create a discernable pattern to the ear, Schoenberg arranged the 12 notes in a certain order. Say, A, Eb, D, C#, Bb, F, Ab, F#, B, E, C, C for example. As these notes are repeated in the same sequence over and over you can hopefully begin to recognize the pattern they make. Here is a video tutorial on 12-tone composition for you to look at:
I hope you will begin to give this music a chance and try to listen with open ears. It could be the beginning of a whole new musical adventure for you. As we explore the different film score composers in the Criterion Collection, I may present a tutorial like this from time to time to help everyone feel included in what I'm writing about. The purpose of this blog is not to talk over your heads and display my musical knowledge (not all that impressive, really) but to join you in an exploration of new musical directions. I hope this blog entry helped me to start achieve that ultimate goal. Let me know what you think. Maybe next time we'll look at electronic music in the 50's.
Thanks for reading.
