a groovy 12-tone row
Catherine and I just watched The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. Great movie! and the score is nice and groovy. The first thing that comes at you is a simple bass line and early-70s groove, and the second is a series of distributed, jazzily dissonant melodic bursts by trumpets and saxes.... wait ... yep .... 12 a piece. Twelve-tone rows! Turns out old David Shire actually got out the manuscript paper and made a full chart, with inversions, retrograde, the whole bit. Then he added some chicken grease.
The twelve-tone row is something invented by the composer Arnold Schoenberg back in the early twentieth century. Tonality had come a long way from the old first-base-second-base-third-base-home that we're used to in older classical music (and are still used to in pop and folk and other styles). For instance, sing this:
When you get to those "you"s, it feels right. The "you" on the very first line is a trip to the bases, and the next "you" answers it by coming to the home base of whatever key you're in. That's the tonic note, called that because it's the tone that's central to that key. When we say something's "in the key of C," what we mean is that the "you" lands on C.
But picture the more complex music of, say Dmitri Tiomkin's scores for those old Hitchcock movies. Right at the moment the hero and heroine discover they're in anguished love, and exchange a smashy, unpleasurable-looking kiss, the music is probably something you'd find it hard to say is in the key of something — its reaching, yearning, anguished quality is precisely because the writer has carefully avoided even a reference to the tonic home base. Take that kind of stuff to its logical conclusion, and you've got what's called atonal music. It literally has no tonic home base.
So, Schoenberg and company were trying to methodologize this a century ago, and came up with the old twelve-tone row concept: given that there are only twelve notes on a piano keyboard, repeated over and over, you just make sure you've hit every one of the twelve tones before you start repeating. This is as far as you can get from "Happy Birthday." You wind up with those weird leaps and unhummable melodies that people say they don't like about atonal music. It must be said, though, that we accept them without blinking in movie scores — especially, for some reason, cop stuff.
Once you've got your basic melody, you can then do all the stuff the traditional composers have always done to generate more material: turn it upside down, do it backwards, upside-down-and-backwards, slow it down, speed it up.
In Pelham 1-2-3, Shire put that twelve-tone technique to work while still anchoring it to a definitely tonal bass riff. The result is something that doesn't jangle or sound old-timey or sing-songy: it's just what he was looking for.
Take a listen.
The twelve-tone row is something invented by the composer Arnold Schoenberg back in the early twentieth century. Tonality had come a long way from the old first-base-second-base-third-base-home that we're used to in older classical music (and are still used to in pop and folk and other styles). For instance, sing this:
Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday to you.
Happy Birthday dear Barry,
Happy Birthday to you.
When you get to those "you"s, it feels right. The "you" on the very first line is a trip to the bases, and the next "you" answers it by coming to the home base of whatever key you're in. That's the tonic note, called that because it's the tone that's central to that key. When we say something's "in the key of C," what we mean is that the "you" lands on C.
But picture the more complex music of, say Dmitri Tiomkin's scores for those old Hitchcock movies. Right at the moment the hero and heroine discover they're in anguished love, and exchange a smashy, unpleasurable-looking kiss, the music is probably something you'd find it hard to say is in the key of something — its reaching, yearning, anguished quality is precisely because the writer has carefully avoided even a reference to the tonic home base. Take that kind of stuff to its logical conclusion, and you've got what's called atonal music. It literally has no tonic home base.
So, Schoenberg and company were trying to methodologize this a century ago, and came up with the old twelve-tone row concept: given that there are only twelve notes on a piano keyboard, repeated over and over, you just make sure you've hit every one of the twelve tones before you start repeating. This is as far as you can get from "Happy Birthday." You wind up with those weird leaps and unhummable melodies that people say they don't like about atonal music. It must be said, though, that we accept them without blinking in movie scores — especially, for some reason, cop stuff.
Once you've got your basic melody, you can then do all the stuff the traditional composers have always done to generate more material: turn it upside down, do it backwards, upside-down-and-backwards, slow it down, speed it up.
In Pelham 1-2-3, Shire put that twelve-tone technique to work while still anchoring it to a definitely tonal bass riff. The result is something that doesn't jangle or sound old-timey or sing-songy: it's just what he was looking for.
Take a listen.
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