Day Four: The Tone Row Exercise

A highly useful technique for using the 12 tones.

This post is part of 14 Days of Harmony, a free course for musicians who want to deepen their understanding of harmony, and learn how to develop their connection with sound as a result. You can view the entire course here.

The 12 tone row exercise helps us practice experiencing a unity of form. When we sit down to write one, our goal is to guide the ear away from a fundamental note and return back home to it. This is essentially what we do in any piece of tonal music. The practice comes from uniting all of the different elements and understanding how each of the parts relate to one another. Since this exercise has so many restrictions, it is easy to focus and become extremely creative within the boundaries that are set. 

Each interval in a melody or tone row contributes to the line of musical tension, the line of attention that runs through relating all of the notes in the phrase to a single point musically furthest away from the beginning and end.

The goal is to guide the ear away from …