Fair warning: this article contains music theory terms. You do not necessarily need to know what these terms mean in order to understand the article.
Introduction:
In the early 1900s, composers were becoming disheartened with standard music theory. They began to hit a rut in the realm of tonality. In other words, they were running out of unique ways in which they could write their compositions within certain musical key signatures as a result of the great number of rules, guidelines, and techniques set forth by music theory.
As I discussed in my previous LinkedIn article, “How Music Can Help You Write Original Stories,” there are enough musical possibilities to fulfill our creative urges for multiple lifetimes. However, as far as composers were concerned, all of the chords, structures, forms, cadences, and other musical devices were being pulled out of the hypothetical bag of musical devices; soon, the bag would be empty.
Experimental composers in the same vein as Arnold Schoenberg strove for originality by breaking away from key centricity and tonality. They wanted to find ways to incorporate notes that a classically trained composer would never think to use because they would make the piece sound more dissonant. Therein lay the foundation of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique. In a world of overwhelming consonance, something must go sour eventually. In art, beauty is subjective. To the ear of the experimental composer, a dissonant chord may make the piece more colorful than the “conventional” consonant chord would.
How does all of this connect to creative writing? Music composition and creative writing are both forms of art, and beauty is subjective in art. One writer may be tired of hackneyed plot structures or stilted paragraph formatting rules and wish to explore beyond what other writers would call “conventional.”
In this article, we will explore an experimental method inspired by Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique with which you can more freely manipulate your story’s structure and series of events so that it no longer fits within the sphere of a conventional story. As writers, we should be creative anyway.
A Brief Summary Of The Twelve-Tone Technique:
My previous article brought chords into creative writing. This demonstrated that your story’s structure is similar to chord progressions in that certain elements lead into other elements and create smooth connections along the way. While literary elements behave differently than do notes in music, they can work the same way. The twelve-tone technique takes this idea of connected elements to a different level.
I will briefly explain what the twelve-tone technique is before we delve into it any further. On a piano, there are twelve notes within an octave. An octave contains twelve notes bound within two versions of the same note. For example, there are eight different C keys on the standard piano keyboard; starting from C3 and ending on C4, we have C3, C#3, D3, D#3, E3, F3, F#3, G3, G#3, A3, A#3, B3, and C4. All of these notes are found within one octave. Of course, not all octaves start on C. If you start on D3 and end on D4, there are still twelve notes within the group, just starting on D this time. These twelve notes form what is called a chromatic scale, the basis of the twelve-tone technique. (I should add that you can name the same note with either a sharp [#] or a flat [♭]; F# is the same as Gb.)
After you have formed a chromatic scale starting from any note, begin to haphazardly select notes to form your twelve-tone row.
My Chromatic Scale: D Eb E F Gb G Ab A Bb B C Db (D)
My Twelve-Tone Row: Db, C, Eb, Bb, B, E, F, Gb, A, G, Ab, D
This row is your primary row in its primary form; it can also be called P0. (We use the superscript 0 if the row starts from the same note. If we were to start from D rather than from Db, then we would use the superscript 1 because D is one half step higher than Db is on a piano keyboard.) According to mathematics, once you have created your row, you can manipulate it into up to 48 unique forms. There are three primary actions specific to the twelve-tone technique that you can use.
The retrograde reverses your row horizontally; this version of your row can be called “R0.”
Row P0: Db, C, Eb, Bb, B, E, F, Gb, A, G, Ab, D
Row R0: D, Ab, G, A, Gb, F, E, B, Bb, Eb, C, Db
The inversion reverses your row vertically. If within your primary row one note ascends by three half steps on a piano (by three piano keys,) then in your inverted row, or “I0,” that same note descends by three half steps. This reversal applies to all of the notes in your row.
Row P0: Db, C, Eb, Bb, B, E, F, Gb, A, G, Ab, D
Row I0: Db, D, B, E, Eb, Bb, A, Ab, F, G, Gb, C
The retrograde inversion (or “RI0”) is a horizontal reversal of I0.
Row P0: Db, C, Eb, Bb, B, E, F, Gb, A, G, Ab, D
Row RI0: C, Gb, G, F, Ab, A, Bb, Eb, E, B, D, Db
The most indispensable rule of the twelve-tone technique is that once a note is played, it absolutely cannot be repeated until all of the other notes in the row have been played through. You can still come up with fresh ways to musically expand upon your row. I am not going into detail about that. The purpose of this explanation was to provide a proper background so that you can correctly inspire your writing through thinking about the concept of the twelve-tone technique, which we will do now.
Putting Your Row Into Writing:
The next step in this experimental creative writing method is to apply your knowledge of the twelve-tone technique to letters of the alphabet rather than to musical notes. The unit of this method is the paragraph; in other words, the row that you create through this method will contain the letters that will begin each paragraph of your story.
You can go on to assign each letter a particular literary task. The paragraph beginning with the letter “H” can be written keeping in mind a specific emotion such as rage, or a character reveal, or a change of setting, et cetera; the choice is yours.
This time, the full alphabet is your chromatic scale, minus two letters. I would surmise that one would most likely omit the letters “X” and “Z” to form this revised alphabet, as they are the least prolifically used letters in the alphabet (for English speakers at least.)
Revised Alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z
Create pairs of letters so that you end up with twelve pairs rather than twenty-four letters; this process can also be haphazard.
Random Pairs: AH; OT; BI; CJ; PU; DK; QV; EL; FM; RW; GN; SY
Remember: these letters will begin your paragraphs.
In order to continue, you must assign each letter pair a note and form your row.
Key of Letter Pairs: AH = A OT = A# / Bb BI = B CJ = C PU = C# / Db DK = D QV = D# / Eb EL = E FM = F RW = F# / Gb GN = G SY = G# / Ab
Db, C, Eb, Bb, B, E, F, Gb, A, G, Ab, D
You may now proceed in one of two ways. Remember the cardinal rule of the twelve-tone technique: once a note is played, it absolutely cannot be repeated until all of the other notes in the row have been played through.
1: Starting with the first note of your row, in this case Db, refer to your key and choose one of the letters, for example “U.” Proceed to the next note, which would be C, and choose one of the letters, for example “J.” Once you get to D, return to the beginning, Db, and use the remaining letters in order. My sequence may be:
U, J, V, O, B, E, M, W, A, N, S, D / P, C. Q, T, I, L, F, R, H, G, Y, K
2: Starting with the first note of your row, in this case Db, refer to your key and use both letters in its pair before moving on to the next pair. I can start my first paragraph with “U” and the following paragraph would begin with “P,” or vice versa. Only after using both letters in the pair would I be able to proceed to the next pair for C, which consists of the letters “C” and “J.”
An Advanced Challenge:
If you wish to further challenge your creative writing abilities, then I invite you to explore this alternative way of looking at my method.
Most of the time, songs contain bass parts. This article would not serve as a thorough connection of music to creative writing if I were to neglect to discuss how bass can be incorporated into this method. As I stated earlier, you can assign literary tasks to each letter pair; the same can be done to these “bass notes.” However, in this case, there can only be one “bass note” per “measure.”
For example, if “K” is your “bass note” for a particular “measure” of your story, with four letters per “measure” including “K,” with the other three letters being “W,” “C,” and “Y,” “K” can apply a certain supplementary literary task to all four letters even if the other three letters already have independent literary tasks.
There is no need to fret; I will clarify below.
This is my row and sequence:
Key of Letter Pairs: AH = A OT = A# / Bb BI = B CJ = C PU = C# / Db DK = D QV = D# / Eb EL = E FM = F RW = F# / Gb GN = G SY = G# / Ab
Db, C, Eb, Bb, B, E, F, Gb, A, G, Ab, D
U, J, V, O, B, E, M, W, A, N, S, D / P, C. Q, T, I, L, F, R, H, G, Y, K
Imagine that these letters are notes on a musical staff broken into six “measures” of four notes each. I want to assign the first letter in each group as the “bass note” so to speak.
*U,* J, V, O, *B,* E, M, W, *A,* N, S, D, *P,* C. Q, T, *I,* L, F, R, *H,* G, Y, K
I interpret each “bass note” as the bass for each “measure” and still use it before the other letters in the “measure.” In other words, I would start the first paragraph of my story with “U” and the next ones with “J,” “V,” and “O” before moving forward to the next “measure;” then, I would begin the fifth paragraph of my story with “B,” and so on. You can interpret “measure” freely; for the purpose of this explanation, the word “measure” is meant to clarify what I am trying to get across with this discussion of “bass notes” and “measures.”
*U,* J, V, O | *B,* E, M, W, | *A,* N, S, D, | *P,* C. Q, T, | *I,* L, F, R, | *H,* G, Y, K
Finally, as an added bonus, if you were to omit the letter “I” from your revised alphabet as opposed to “X” or “Z,” then you would need to prepare yourself for a true literary challenge. That would mean that you cannot start any paragraph with the personal pronoun I. This would test your ability to control your use of personal pronouns in stories told from a first-person point of view. If you omit “T,” then none of your paragraphs can begin with the words “the,” “then,” “that,” or any character name beginning with “T.”
Conclusion:
Keep in mind that you do not have to restrict yourself to cycling through just one row. Get creative and risky; you are a creative writer anyway.
One of the main goals behind Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique is to let composers escape from the confines of tonality. In the world of creative writing, this translates into an escape from the beginning-middle-end rut, the triangular plot diagram (consisting of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution,) et cetera. I believe that my method of borrowing the twelve-tone technique and filtering it through a literary lens acts as a fun, experimental method with which you can maximize your original literary ideas and do something with them which nobody else has done. Tonality is the skeleton of conventional music just as structure is the skeleton of a story. Stories are written life, and life has no tonality.
Works Cited:
musictheory.net. (2018). Matrix Calculator. https://www.musictheory.net/calculators/matrix.
Open Music Theory. (2018). Twelve-Tone Theory - Basics. http://openmusictheory.com/twelveToneBasics.html.
Román, D. (n.d.). Twelve-Tone Technique: A Quick Reference. Musiké: Revista del Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico. https://musike.cmpr.edu/docs/v001/roman-eng.pdf.
Comments