Talk:Tone row

Maybe this article would better fit under the heading Twelve-tone technique, the tone row only being an element of it. -- Tsja

I agree. I'm thinking there should be a big article on 20th century harmony/composition, maybe starting with the late impressionists and moving up to the sorts of things sibelius and Schnittke were doing.JFQ

I also agree that this is not the place for this article. Where it should be, I'm not sure. I hope to get a decent article on the subject together in the next few weeks, so I've been thinking about where it should go. Here are things as I see them:

The tone row in twelve-tone music is analogous to harmony in tonal music - it is what makes it tick, what holds it together, but it isn't the thing itself. Also, a google search for "tone row system" comes up with a mere 22 matches. The article should be elsewhere.
One alternative is Twelve-tone technique which you could also call Twelve tone technique, Twelve-tone music, Twelve tone music, Twelve-note music, Twelve tone system and so on. This is an awful lot of alternatives, and I wouldn't know which one to go with. It may not be a problem, but I think there is a better solution.
An apparent solution is to place the article at dodecaphony, which is a synonym for "twelve tone technique" and all those other things in No. 2 above. Unfortunately, this is not a particularly widely used term (Google reports around 1000 matches), and in my view its use is becoming rarer.
Another way is to place the article at Serialism (around 7000 Google matches) or Serial music. This is not the same thing as twelve-tone music; twelve-tone music serialises only the pitches, while "serial music" is a more general term where any element of the music may be serialised (such as the durations of notes, the dynamics, the method of attack, etc). However, serialism could cover all these things, "total serialisation" (where all elements of the music are serialised) as was practised by Pierre Boulez and others, as well as "simple" twelve-tone music which was its ancestor.

It's this last solution which I think is the best. You can't have an explanation of total serialisation without covering all the basic twelve-note stuff anyway. If you make the two things different articles, anybody reading the serial music article would also have to read the twelve-tone article, so they may as well go in the same place. You can't put them both at "twelve-tone technique" because not all serial pieces are twelve-tone pieces, but you can put them both at serialism, because all twelve-tone pieces are serial pieces.

Whew! I sort of feel I'm answering a question that hasn't been asked, but if nothing else, I've convinced myself that an article at serialism or, if there is another meaning of that word, serial music is the way to go. Anybody else have any thoughts?

By the way, JFQ, an exhaustive explanation of all 20th century compositional techniques would probably give too long an article to be much use, but I think a list of such techniques, with links to pages on each of them could be very useful (it would let us see what hasn't been covered yet, for a start). --Camembert