12 Tone Serialism

This is less of a specific project but more of a musical movement that occurred in the mid 20th century. Serialism is the systematic composition of music that is completely unbiased in terms of tonal center. Where as most music is written in a key (B major, c minor, etc.), serialistic music equally values each of the 12 notes found in western music.

A key aspect of this form of music is the tone row. Tone rows are mathematically generated lists of the 12 chromatic notes. The only rule to these lists is that each note must appear exactly once. The most famous 12 tone composer was Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), he is also credited with the creation of the 12 tone system.

https://www.instructables.com/id/Create-a-Twelve-Tone-melody-with-a-Twelve-Tone-Mat/

This website goes into detail about one way of creating tone rows. While this is not the only way to go about doing it, it is one of the most well known methods.

While the order of the 12 notes is usually random, the artistry of the composer manifests in how they use the notes presented to them. While most serialistic music sounds extremely jarring to first-time listeners, an incredible amount of thought and care goes into their arrangement.

Composers transform their given notes in many creative ways. Some examples would be transposition, retrograde, and inversions. Often, part of the fun of 12 tone pieces is trying to figure out what the composer did to transform their original tone row into the piece you are hearing.