All-interval twelve-tone row

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All-interval row from Alban Berg's Lyric Suite Play.
Elliott Carter often bases his all-interval sets on the list generated by Bauer-Mendelberg and Ferentz and uses them as a "tonic" sonority[1] Play.
All-interval series from Luigi Nono's Il canto sospesoPlay.[2] (Equivalent to Nicolas Slonimsky's "Grandmother Chord".)[3]
Play

In music, an all-interval twelve-tone row, series, or chord, is a twelve-tone tone row arranged so that it contains one instance of each interval within the octave, 1 through 11. A "twelve-note spatial set made up of the eleven intervals [between consecutive pitches]."[1] There are 1,928 distinct all-interval twelve-tone rows.[4] These sets may be ordered in time or in register. "Distinct" in this context means in transpositionally and rotationally normal form (yielding 3856 such series), and disregarding inversionally related forms.[5]

Since the sum of numbers 1 through 11 equals 66, an all-interval row must contain a tritone between its first and last notes.[6]

Examples

Mother chord

Mother chord[7] Play

The first known all-interval row, the Mother chord, was devised by Fritz Heinrich Klein: F, E, C, A, G, D, A, D, E, G, B, C.[8]

0 e 7 4 2 9 3 8 t 1 5 6

The intervals between consecutive pairs of notes are the following (t = 10, e = 11):

 e 8 9 t 7 6 5 2 3 4 1

This row was also used by Alban Berg in his Lyric Suite (1926).

Chromatic scale Play.

In contrast, the chromatic scale only contains the interval 1 between each consecutive note:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 t e
 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

and is thus not an all-interval row.

Grandmother chord

Grandmother chord[9] Play

The Grandmother chord is an eleven-interval, twelve-note, invertible chord with all of the properties of the Mother chord. Additionally, the intervals are so arranged that they alternate odd and even intervals (counted by semitones) and that the odd intervals successively decrease by one whole-tone while the even intervals successively increase by one whole-tone.[10] It was invented by Nicolas Slonimsky on February 13, 1938.[11]

    0   e   1   t   2   9   3   8   4   7   5   6
     \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ /
odd:  e   |   9   |   7   |   5   |   3   |   1
even:     2       4       6       8       t

Link chords

'Link' chord used once in Carter's "End of Chapter".[12] Play

'Link' chords are all-interval twelve-tone sets containing one or more uninterrupted instances of the all-trichord hexachord ({012478}). Found by John F. Link, they have been used by Elliott Carter in pieces such as Symphonia.[13][14]

0 1 4 8 7 2 e 9 3 5 t 6
 1 3 4 e 7 9 t 6 2 5 8
0 4 e 5 2 1 3 8 9 7 t 6
 4 7 6 9 e 2 5 1 t 3 8

There are four 'Link' chords which are RI-invariant.[15]

0 t 3 e 2 1 7 8 5 9 4 6
 t 5 8 3 e 6 1 9 4 7 2
0 t 9 5 8 1 7 2 e 3 4 6
 t e 8 3 5 6 7 9 4 1 2

See also

Sources

  1. ^ a b Schiff, David (1998). The Music of Elliott Carter, second edition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), pp. 34–36. ISBN 0-8014-3612-5. Labels added to image.
  2. ^ Leeuw, Ton de (2005). Music of the Twentieth Century: A Study of Its Elements and Structure , translated from the Dutch by Stephen Taylor (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), p. 177. ISBN 90-5356-765-8. Translation of Muziek van de twintigste eeuw: een onderzoek naar haar elementen en structuur. Utrecht: Oosthoek, 1964. Third impression, Utrecht: Bohn, Scheltema & Holkema, 1977. ISBN 90-313-0244-9.
  3. ^ Slonimsky, Nicolas (1975). Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, p. 185. ISBN 0-8256-1449-X.
  4. ^ Carter, Elliott (2002). Harmony Book, p.15. Nicholas Hopkins and John F. Link, eds. ISBN 9780825845949.
  5. ^ Robert Morris and Daniel Starr (1974). "The Structure of All-Interval Series", Journal of Music Theory 18/2: pp. 364-89, citation on p. 366.
  6. ^ Slonimsky (1975), p.iv.
  7. ^ Schuijer, Michiel (2008). Analyzing Atonal Music: Pitch-class Set Theory and Its Contexts, p.116. University Rochester Press. ISBN 9781580462709.
  8. ^ Whittall, Arnold (2008). The Cambridge Introduction to Serialism, p. 271 and 68–69. ISBN 978-0-521-68200-8.
  9. ^ Slonimsky (1975), p.243.
  10. ^ Slonimsky (1975), p.iii.
  11. ^ Slonimsky (1975), p.vii.
  12. ^ Boland, Marguerite and Link, John (2012). Elliott Carter Studies, p.281. Cambridge University. ISBN 9780521113625.
  13. ^ Schiff (1998), p.41.
  14. ^ Boland and Link (2012), p.67.
  15. ^ Boland and Link (2012), p.208.

Further reading

  • Bauer-Mendelberg, Stefan, and Melvin Ferentz (1965). "On Eleven-Interval Twelve-Tone Rows", Perspectives of New Music 3/2: 93–103.
  • Cohen, David (1972–73). "A Re-examination of All-Interval Rows", Proceedings of the American Society of University Composers 7/8: 73–74.

External links

  • "List of all all-interval rows". Archived from the original on March 8, 2012. Retrieved September 30, 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)