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56-639: The Fred Frith Guitar Quartet was an American-based contemporary classical and experimental music guitar quartet comprising Fred Frith , René Lussier , Nick Didkovsky and Mark Stewart . The group was formed in 1989 by Frith and they performed extensively across North America and Europe for the next ten years, including at the 14th Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in Victoriaville , Quebec , Canada in May 1997. They recorded their first album, Ayaya Moses in 1996, and released

112-593: A Can . Frith had been collaborating with Lussier on various projects since the early 1980s, had performed regularly with Stewart, and had produced Doctor Nerve's album, Armed Observation (1987). Frith originally created the quartet in 1989 to perform a composition for four electric guitars, "The As Usual Dance Towards the Other Flight to What is Not" that he had previously written for, but not performed in, Les 4 Guitaristes de l'Apocalypso-Bar . The original quartet, Lussier, Didkovsky, Mark Howell and Frith, recorded

168-402: A composition which are written freely, without recourse to the twelve-tone technique at all. Offshoots or variations may produce music in which: Also, some composers, including Stravinsky, have used cyclic permutation , or rotation, where the row is taken in order but using a different starting note. Stravinsky also preferred the inverse-retrograde , rather than the retrograde-inverse, treating

224-555: A live album, Upbeat in 1999. The quartet experimented with guitar music, composing and performing their own material, improvising, and re-arranging existing guitar pieces by other composers. Their music varied from "tuneful and pretty, to noisy, aggressive and quite challenging." The quartet comprised four " avant-garde " guitarists and composers: Englishman Fred Frith from Henry Cow , French Canadian René Lussier from Conventum , and United States musicians Nick Didkovsky from Doctor Nerve and Mark Stewart from Bang on

280-480: A method of musical composition . The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded equally often 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 . All 12 notes are thus given more or less equal importance, and the music avoids being in a key . The technique was first devised by Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer , who published his "law of

336-497: A minute intervallic cell " which in addition to expansion may be transformed as with a tone row, and in which individual notes may "function as pivotal elements, to permit overlapping statements of a basic cell or the linking of two or more basic cells". The twelve-tone technique was also preceded by "nondodecaphonic serial composition" used independently in the works of Alexander Scriabin , Igor Stravinsky , Béla Bartók , Carl Ruggles , and others. Oliver Neighbour argues that Bartók

392-487: A new methodology of experimental music , which began to question fundamental notions of music such as notation , performance , duration, and repetition, while others (Babbitt, Rochberg, Sessions) fashioned their own extensions of the twelve-tone serialism of Schoenberg . The vocabulary of extended tonality, which flourished in the late 19th and very early 20th centuries, continues to be used by contemporary composers. It has never been considered shocking or controversial in

448-553: A piece composed by each member of the group; and a collection of improvised suites by the quartet. Their second album, Upbeat was drawn from concerts the quartet had performed in Austria , Germany , Switzerland , France and Spain in November 1997. It contained composed material from each of the group members, plus improvised pieces, and was released on Ambiances Magnétiques in 1999. Contemporary classical music At

504-460: A row) into a rectangular design", in which the vertical columns (harmonies) of the rectangle are derived from the adjacent segments of the row and the horizontal columns (melodies) are not (and thus may contain non-adjacencies). For example, the layout of all possible 'even' cross partitions is as follows: One possible realization out of many for the order numbers of the 3 cross partition, and one variation of that, are: Thus if one's tone row

560-418: A set and the so-operationally transformed set that inhere in the operation", a definition very close to that of mathematical invariance . George Perle describes their use as "pivots" or non-tonal ways of emphasizing certain pitches . Invariant rows are also combinatorial and derived . A cross partition is an often monophonic or homophonic technique which, "arranges the pitch classes of an aggregate (or

616-533: A sharp distinction. Musical historicism —the use of historical materials, structures, styles, techniques, media, conceptual content, etc., whether by a single composer or those associated with a particular school, movement, or period—is evident to varying degrees in minimalism, post-minimalism, world-music, and other genres in which tonal traditions have been sustained or have undergone a significant revival in recent decades. Some post-minimalist works employ medieval and other genres associated with early music, such as

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672-500: A shift in the paradigm of computer technology had taken place, making electronic music systems affordable and widely accessible. The personal computer had become an essential component of the electronic musician's equipment, superseding analog synthesizers and fulfilling the traditional functions of composition and scoring, synthesis and sound processing, sampling of audio input, and control over external equipment. Some authors equate polystylism with eclecticism , while others make

728-417: 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). Appearances of P can be transformed from the original in three basic ways: The various transformations can be combined. These give rise to a set-complex of forty-eight forms of

784-419: Is in any case not interval-preserving.) Derivation is transforming segments of the full chromatic, fewer than 12 pitch classes, to yield a complete set, most commonly using trichords, tetrachords, and hexachords. A derived set can be generated by choosing appropriate transformations of any trichord except 0,3,6, the diminished triad . A derived set can also be generated from any tetrachord that excludes

840-601: Is overemphasized: The distinction often made between Hauer and the Schoenberg school—that the former's music is based on unordered hexachords while the latter's is based on an ordered series—is false: while he did write pieces that could be thought of as "trope pieces", much of Hauer's twelve-tone music employs an ordered series. The "strict ordering" of the Second Viennese school, on the other hand, "was inevitably tempered by practical considerations: they worked on

896-542: Is repeated. The method was used during the next twenty years almost exclusively by the composers of the Second Viennese School — Alban Berg , Anton Webern , and Schoenberg himself. Although, another important composer in this period was Elisabeth Lutyens who wrote more than 50 pieces using the serial method. The twelve tone technique was preceded by "freely" atonal pieces of 1908–1923 which, though "free", often have as an "integrative element ...

952-531: Is usually atonal , and treats each of the 12 semitones of the chromatic scale with equal importance, as opposed to earlier classical music which had treated some notes as more important than others (particularly the tonic and the dominant note ). The technique became widely used by the fifties, taken up by composers such as Milton Babbitt , Luciano Berio , Pierre Boulez , Luigi Dallapiccola , Ernst Krenek , Riccardo Malipiero , and, after Schoenberg's death, Igor Stravinsky . Some of these composers extended

1008-669: The Brothers Quay in In Absentia (2000) used music by Karlheinz Stockhausen . Some notable works for chamber orchestra: In recent years, many composers have composed for concert bands (also called wind ensembles). Notable composers include: The following is an incomplete list of contemporary-music festivals: Twelve-tone technique The twelve-tone technique —also known as dodecaphony , twelve-tone serialism , and (in British usage) twelve-note composition —is

1064-507: The "Oi me lasso" and other laude of Gavin Bryars . The historicist movement is closely related to the emergence of musicology and the early music revival . A number of historicist composers have been influenced by their intimate familiarity with the instrumental practices of earlier periods ( Hendrik Bouman , Grant Colburn, Michael Talbot , Paulo Galvão , Roman Turovsky-Savchuk ). The musical historicism movement has also been stimulated by

1120-407: The 'simplest', is defined as follows: 'rows are set one after the other, with all notes sounding in the order prescribed by this succession of rows, regardless of texture'. The latter is more complex: the musical texture 'is the product of several rows progressing simultaneously in as many voices' (note that these 'voices' are not necessarily restricted to individual instruments and therefore cut across

1176-502: The 12-tone technique in his work. Bradley described his use thus: The Twelve-Tone System provides the 'out-of-this-world' progressions so necessary to under-write the fantastic and incredible situations which present-day cartoons contain. An example of Bradley's use of the technique to convey building tension occurs in the Tom & Jerry short " Puttin' on the Dog ", from 1944. In a scene where

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1232-468: The United States. Some of their compositions use an ordered set or several such sets, which may be the basis for the whole composition, while others use "unordered" sets. The term is also often used for dodecaphony , or twelve-tone technique , which is alternatively regarded as the model for integral serialism. Despite its decline in the last third of the 20th century, there remained at the end of

1288-523: The basis of an interaction between ordered and unordered pitch collections." Rudolph Reti , an early proponent, says: "To replace one structural force (tonality) by another (increased thematic oneness) is indeed the fundamental idea behind the twelve-tone technique", arguing it arose out of Schoenberg's frustrations with free atonality, providing a "positive premise" for atonality. In Hauer's breakthrough piece Nomos , Op. 19 (1919) he used twelve-tone sections to mark out large formal divisions, such as with

1344-646: The beginning of the 20th century, composers of classical music were experimenting with an increasingly dissonant pitch language, which sometimes yielded atonal pieces. Following World War I, as a backlash against what they saw as the increasingly exaggerated gestures and formlessness of late Romanticism, certain composers adopted a neoclassic style, which sought to recapture the balanced forms and clearly perceptible thematic processes of earlier styles (see also New Objectivity and social realism ). After World War II, modernist composers sought to achieve greater levels of control in their composition process (e.g., through

1400-627: The century an active core of composers who continued to advance the ideas and forms of high modernism. Those no longer living include Pierre Boulez , Pauline Oliveros , Toru Takemitsu , Jacob Druckman , George Perle , Ralph Shapey , Franco Donatoni , Helmut Lachenmann , Salvatore Sciarrino , Jonathan Harvey , Erkki Salmenhaara , and Henrik Otto Donner . Those still living in June 2024 include Magnus Lindberg , George Benjamin , Brian Ferneyhough , Wolfgang Rihm , Richard Wernick , Richard Wilson , and James MacMillan . Between 1975 and 1990,

1456-1228: The composer Nigel Osborne , the Belgian musicologist Harry Halbreich , and the British/Australian musicologist Richard Toop , who gave currency to the concept of a movement with his article "Four Facets of the New Complexity". Though often atonal , highly abstract, and dissonant in sound, the "New Complexity" is most readily characterized by the use of techniques which require complex musical notation . This includes extended techniques , microtonality , odd tunings , highly disjunct melodic contour , innovative timbres , complex polyrhythms , unconventional instrumentations , abrupt changes in loudness and intensity, and so on. The diverse group of composers writing in this style includes Richard Barrett , Brian Ferneyhough , Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf , James Dillon , Michael Finnissy , James Erber , and Roger Redgate . Notable composers of operas since 1975 include: Notable composers of post-1945 classical film and television scores include: Contemporary classical music originally written for

1512-803: The composition in April 1992 and it was released on Frith's Quartets album in 1994. Later Stewart replaced Howell and the group became known as the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet. The quartet's first album under its new name was recorded in Radio-Canada 's Studio 12 at Maison Radio-Canada in Montreal in July and November 1996, and was released on Lussier's own Ambiances Magnétiques label. The CD consisted of three pieces composed by Italian Olivia Bignardi and Québécois Claude Vivier ;

1568-575: The concert hall can also be heard on the music track of some films, such as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999), both of which used concert music by György Ligeti , and also in Kubrick's The Shining (1980) which used music by both Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki . Jean-Luc Godard , in La Chinoise (1967), Nicolas Roeg in Walkabout (1971), and

1624-438: The construction of the row itself, and not to the interpretation of the row in the composition. (Thus, for example, postulate 2 does not mean, contrary to common belief, that no note in a twelve-tone work can be repeated until all twelve have been sounded.) While a row may be expressed literally on the surface as thematic material, it need not be, and may instead govern the pitch structure of the work in more abstract ways. Even when

1680-534: The formation of such international organizations as the Delian Society and Vox Saeculorum . Some composers have emerged since the 1980s who are influenced by art rock , for example, Rhys Chatham . New Complexity is a current within today's European contemporary avant-garde music scene, named in reaction to the New Simplicity. Amongst the candidates suggested for having coined the term are

1736-545: The former as the compositionally predominant, "untransposed" form. Although usually atonal, twelve tone music need not be—several pieces by Berg, for instance, have tonal elements. One of the best known twelve-note compositions is Variations for Orchestra by Arnold Schoenberg . "Quiet", in Leonard Bernstein 's Candide , satirizes the method by using it for a song about boredom, and Benjamin Britten used

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1792-409: The full chromatic. Invariant formations are also the side effect of derived rows where a segment of a set remains similar or the same under transformation. These may be used as "pivots" between set forms, sometimes used by Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg . Invariance is defined as the "properties of a set that are preserved under [any given] operation, as well as those relationships between

1848-405: The interval class 4, a major third , between any two elements. The opposite, partitioning , uses methods to create segments from sets, most often through registral difference . Combinatoriality is a side-effect of derived rows where combining different segments or sets such that the pitch class content of the result fulfills certain criteria, usually the combination of hexachords which complete

1904-671: The larger musical world—as has been demonstrated statistically for the United States, at least, where "most composers continued working in what has remained throughout this century the mainstream of tonal-oriented composition". Serialism is one of the most important post-war movements among the high modernist schools. Serialism, more specifically named "integral" or "compound" serialism, was led by composers such as Pierre Boulez , Luciano Berio , Bruno Maderna , Luigi Nono , and Karlheinz Stockhausen in Europe, and by Milton Babbitt , Donald Martino , Mario Davidovsky , and Charles Wuorinen in

1960-457: The most influential composers in Europe were Pierre Boulez , Luigi Nono , and Karlheinz Stockhausen . The first and last were both pupils of Olivier Messiaen . An important aesthetic philosophy as well as a group of compositional techniques at this time was serialism (also called "through-ordered music", "'total' music" or "total tone ordering"), which took as its starting point the compositions of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern (and thus

2016-521: The mouse, wearing a dog mask, runs across a yard of dogs "in disguise", a chromatic scale represents both the mouse's movements, and the approach of a suspicious dog, mirrored octaves lower. Apart from his work in cartoon scores, Bradley also composed tone poems that were performed in concert in California. Rock guitarist Ron Jarzombek used a twelve-tone system for composing Blotted Science 's extended play The Animation of Entomology . He put

2072-400: The musical texture, operating as more of a background structure). Serial rows can be connected through elision, a term that describes 'the overlapping of two rows that occur in succession, so that one or more notes at the juncture are shared (are played only once to serve both rows)'. When this elision incorporates two or more notes it creates a row chain; when multiple rows are connected by

2128-466: The notes into a clock and rearranged them to be used that are side by side or consecutive. He called his method "Twelve-Tone in Fragmented Rows." 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 ). There are four postulates or preconditions to the technique which apply to

2184-402: The opening five statements of the same twelve-tone series, stated in groups of five notes making twelve five-note phrases. Felix Khuner contrasted Hauer's more mathematical concept with Schoenberg's more musical approach. Schoenberg's idea in developing the technique was for it to "replace those structural differentiations provided formerly by tonal harmonies ". As such, twelve-tone music

2240-483: The prime form, and the retrograde of which is identical to the inversion (thus, only 24 forms of this tone row are available). In the above example, as is typical, the retrograde inversion contains three points where the sequence of two pitches are identical to the prime row. Thus the generative power of even the most basic transformations is both unpredictable and inevitable. Motivic development can be driven by such internal consistency. Note that rules 1–4 above apply to

2296-558: The prime series, as already explained). However, individual composers have constructed more detailed systems in which matters such as these are also governed by systematic rules (see serialism ). Analyst Kathryn Bailey has used the term 'topography' to describe the particular way in which the notes of a row are disposed in her work on the dodecaphonic music of Webern. She identifies two types of topography in Webern's music: block topography and linear topography. The former, which she views as

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2352-402: The row (also called a set or series ), on which a work or section is based: (In Hauer's system postulate 3 does not apply.) A particular transformation (prime, inversion, retrograde, retrograde-inversion) together with a choice of transpositional level is referred to as a set form or row form . Every row thus has up to 48 different row forms. (Some rows have fewer due to symmetry ; see

2408-415: The same elision (typically identified as the same in set-class terms) this creates a row chain cycle, which therefore provides a technique for organising groups of rows. The tone row chosen as the basis of the piece is called the prime series (P). Untransposed, it is notated as P 0 . Given the twelve pitch classes of the chromatic scale, there are 12 factorial (479,001,600 ) tone rows, although this

2464-448: The sections on derived rows and invariance below.) Suppose the prime form of the row is as follows: Then the retrograde is the prime form in reverse order: The inversion is the prime form with the intervals inverted (so that a rising minor third becomes a falling minor third, or equivalently, a rising major sixth ): And the retrograde inversion is the inverted row in retrograde: P, R, I and RI can each be started on any of

2520-434: The set, 12 transpositions of the four basic forms: P, R, I, RI. The combination of the retrograde and inversion transformations is known as the retrograde inversion ( RI ). thus, each cell in the following table lists the result of the transformations, a four-group , in its row and column headers: However, there are only a few numbers by which one may multiply a row and still end up with twelve tones. (Multiplication

2576-451: The technique is applied in the most literal manner, with a piece consisting of a sequence of statements of row forms, these statements may appear consecutively, simultaneously, or may overlap, giving rise to harmony . Durations, dynamics and other aspects of music other than the pitch can be freely chosen by the composer, and there are also no general rules about which tone rows should be used at which time (beyond their all being derived from

2632-747: The technique to control aspects other than the pitches of notes (such as duration, method of attack and so on), thus producing serial music . Some even subjected all elements of music to the serial process. Charles Wuorinen said in a 1962 interview that while "most of the Europeans say that they have 'gone beyond' and 'exhausted' the twelve-tone system", in America, "the twelve-tone system has been carefully studied and generalized into an edifice more impressive than any hitherto known." American composer Scott Bradley , best known for his musical scores for works like Tom & Jerry and Droopy Dog , utilized

2688-452: The technique, such as Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky , eventually adopted it in their music. Schoenberg himself described the system as a "Method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another". It is commonly considered a form of serialism . Schoenberg's fellow countryman and contemporary Hauer also developed a similar system using unordered hexachords or tropes —independent of Schoenberg's development of

2744-547: The theatrical potential of the musical performance ( performance art , mixed media , fluxus ). New works of contemporary classical music continue to be created. Each year, the Boston Conservatory at Berklee presents 700 performances. New works from contemporary classical music program students comprise roughly 150 of these performances. To some extent, European and the US traditions diverged after World War II. Among

2800-409: The twelve notes of the chromatic scale , meaning that 47 permutations of the initial tone row can be used, giving a maximum of 48 possible tone rows. However, not all prime series will yield so many variations because transposed transformations may be identical to each other. This is known as invariance . A simple case is the ascending chromatic scale, the retrograde inversion of which is identical to

2856-494: The twelve tones" in 1919. In 1923, Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) developed his own, better-known version of 12-tone technique, which became associated with the " Second Viennese School " composers, who were the primary users of the technique in the first decades of its existence. Over time, the technique increased greatly in popularity and eventually became widely influential on Mid 20th-century composers. Many important composers who had originally not subscribed to or actively opposed

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2912-485: The twelve-tone technique. Other composers have created systematic use of the chromatic scale, but Schoenberg's method is considered to be most historically and aesthetically significant. Though most sources will say it was invented by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg in 1921 and first described privately to his associates in 1923, in fact Josef Matthias Hauer published his "law of the twelve tones" in 1919, requiring that all twelve chromatic notes sound before any note

2968-440: The use of the twelve-tone technique and later total serialism ). At the same time, conversely, composers also experimented with means of abdicating control, exploring indeterminacy or aleatoric processes in smaller or larger degrees. Technological advances led to the birth of electronic music. Experimentation with tape loops and repetitive textures contributed to the advent of minimalism . Still other composers started exploring

3024-436: Was "the first composer to use a group of twelve notes consciously for a structural purpose", in 1908 with the third of his fourteen bagatelles. "Essentially, Schoenberg and Hauer systematized and defined for their own dodecaphonic purposes a pervasive technical feature of 'modern' musical practice, the ostinato ". Additionally, John Covach argues that the strict distinction between the two, emphasized by authors including Perle,

3080-453: Was 0 e 7 4 2 9 3 8 t 1 5 6, one's cross partitions from above would be: Cross partitions are used in Schoenberg's Op. 33a Klavierstück and also by Berg but Dallapicolla used them more than any other composer. In practice, the "rules" of twelve-tone technique have been bent and broken many times, not least by Schoenberg himself. For instance, in some pieces two or more tone rows may be heard progressing at once, or there may be parts of

3136-559: Was opposed to traditional twelve-tone music), and was also closely related to Le Corbusier 's idea of the modulor . However, some more traditionally based composers such as Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten maintained a tonal style of composition despite the prominent serialist movement. In America, composers like Milton Babbitt , John Cage , Elliott Carter , Henry Cowell , Philip Glass , Steve Reich , George Rochberg , and Roger Sessions formed their own ideas. Some of these composers (Cage, Cowell, Glass, Reich) represented

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