The Dissolution of Tonality — Schoenberg and the Twelve-Tone Technique

The Gravity of Tonality Vanishes

The functional harmony seen in Articles 4-6 presupposed “the force wanting to return to the tonic (the gravity of tonality).” But at the end of the 19th century, the chromatic harmony of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde stretched that gravity to its limit. Moments of “which key are we in?” multiplied, and the center called the tonic dissolved.

In the early 20th century, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) finally crossed a line — to the negation of tonality itself. For the first time in music theory’s history, the framework of “consonance, center, arrival,” presupposed for 2500 years, is discarded.

Toward Atonality

Around 1908, Schoenberg began writing atonal works:

• no tonic, no function
• no note more “important” than any other
• dissolving the traditional hierarchy of consonance and dissonance

But atonality had a problem. With no center and no rules, on what basis do you choose notes and construct a piece? “Freedom” was also “the loss of a foothold.” Schoenberg himself wrote his early atonal works “relying on intuition.”

The Twelve-Tone Technique — a New Constructive Principle

The answer to this problem was the twelve-tone technique (dodecaphony), established in the 1920s:

• a permutation using all 12 semitones once each (a tone row / Reihe) is fixed for each piece
• until the row is exhausted, no note reappears → the 12 notes are perfectly equal (none becomes the center)
• the row can be used in four transformations: prime (P) / retrograde (R, from the end) / inversion (I, flipped up-down) / retrograde inversion (RI), plus 12 transpositions

That is, in place of “the gravity of tonality,” an artificial rule called the tone row organizes the piece. It gave mathematical order to music without a center.

The Shift from “Description” to “Prescription”

The twelve-tone technique greatly changed the character of music theory’s history (the “description vs. prescription” of the overview):

	Prior theory (through Schenker)	Twelve-tone technique
Role of theory	describes/analyzes existing masterpieces after the fact	prescribes composition in advance
Origin of rules	extracted from practice	invented by the composer

Rameau’s and Riemann’s theories explained “why masterpieces are beautiful” after the fact (descriptive). The twelve-tone technique decides in advance “the piece I will write follows this rule” (prescriptive/constructive). Theory became not a follower of music but a blueprint that generates music — a great 20th-century shift.

The Second Viennese School

Schoenberg and two pupils form the Second Viennese School:

• Alban Berg (1885-1935) — used the twelve-tone technique lyrically. His Violin Concerto “To the memory of an angel” hides a Bach chorale and tonal sonorities in the row, so that atonality and tonality intersect (one of the most beloved works of modern music)
• Anton Webern (1883-1945) — extremely condensed and concise. A minimal twelve-tone like a pointillism of sound. He influenced the postwar total serialism (systematizing not only pitch but rhythm and dynamics)

Schoenberg’s rigor, Berg’s lyricism, Webern’s condensation — three aesthetics were born from one technique.

Afterward — Rejection and Legacy

The twelve-tone and atonal were not widely loved by the general audience, as “difficult and hard to listen to.” But:

• they became the principal idiom of 20th-century art music (contemporary music)
• they were applied to expressing tension and unease in film music
• they left the recognition that “tonality is not absolute but merely one option”

At the same time, other paths “after tonality” distinct from the twelve-tone were explored in parallel, by Messiaen (modes of limited transposition, non-retrogradable rhythms) and others. The very question “after tonality, how can music have order?” became a central theme of 20th-century theory.

From This Article to the Next

Schoenberg discarded tonality and introduced the artificial order of the tone row. This current of “organizing music mathematically” would be pushed further after the war. The next article turns to set theory (pitch-class set theory) — the culmination at which Allen Forte and others analyzed atonal music with sets and group theory, and music theory became fully mathematized.