Twelve-tone technique

Sourced

• "Any attempt to codify musical reality into a kind of imitation grammar (I refer mainly to the efforts associated with the Twelve-Tone System) is a brand of fetishism which shares with Fascism and racism the tendency to reduce live processes to immobile, labelled objects, the tendency to deal with formalities rather than substance. Claude Levi-Strauss describes (though to illustrate a different point) a captain at sea, his ship reduced to a frail raft without sails, who, by enforcing a meticulous protocol on his crew, is able to distract them from nostalgia for a safe harbor and from the desire for a destination."
  • Luciano Berio, quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

• "Alas, this industrialized twelve-tone horse, dull on the outside and empty inside, constantly being perfected and dragged to a new Troy in shadow of an ideological war long since fought and won by responsible minds like Schoenberg, with neither systems nor scholarship for armor!"
  • Luciano Berio, quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

• "Collections of all twelve pitch classes can be differentiated from one another only by assigning an order to the pitch classes or by partitioning them into mutually exclusive sub-collections. The ordering principle is the basis of the twelve-tone system formulated by Schoenberg, the partitioning principle the basis of the system formulated around the same time by Hauer. In Schoenberg's compositional practice, however, the concept of a segmental pitch-class content is represented as well, as a basis for the association of paired inversionally related set forms. On the relation between Schoenberg and Hauer, see Bryan R. Simms, "Who First Composed Twelve-Tone Music, Schoenberg or Hauer?" Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute X/2 (November 1987)."
  • George Perle (1990). The Listening Composer, p. 101n2. California: University of California Press. ISBN 0520069919.

Attributed

• Phillip Glass on The School of Paris as "crazy creepy people writing crazy creepy music."