12 tone diatonicism? Alban Berg: guitar 12 tone serialist composing?

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Hi Guys,

Today, a quick look at exploiting the thinking of serialist composer Alban Berg and his unique tone row formations.

alban-berg-diatonic-12-tone-serialism-technique

What makes this unusual and tonal and ironically diatonic in this context is that one half contains the white notes and the other the black notes.

What you notice is that there are two “Hexatonic” scales here:

alban-berg-diatonic-12-tone-serialism-technique

This creates an interesting harmonic shift that can be exploited easily from a compositional perspective.

Okay, let’s take a tone row from this hexatonic setup:

alban-berg-diatonic-12-tone-row-technique

Now, let’s create some chords form this. I am going to employ tri-chords [three note] chords because they work well with chordal guitar picking:

alban-berg-diatonic-12-tone-serialism-tri-chords

Using these chords as a basis for my composition I will add open guitar strings and and a few fretted notes and re arrange the chord voicing’s, eventually, moving away from 12 tone.

Here are the chords I chose:

alban-berg-diatonic-12-tone-serialism-technique
alban-berg-diatonic-12-tone-serialism-technique
alban-berg-diatonic-12-tone-serialism-chords-guitar
alban-berg-diatonic-12-tone-serialism-chords-guitar

Lastly, a little turn around/cadence:

12-tone-guitar-technique-serialism

Now, let’s exploit another 12 tone row in this context:

alban-berg-diatonic-12-tone-serialism-guitar-how-to

This time I will employ strumming as the main guitar technique for this part of the composition.

So, as usual let’s make some tri-chords:

alban-berg-diatonic-12-tone-serialism-chords-guitar
alban-berg-diatonic-12-tone-serialism-chords-guitar
alban-berg-diatonic-12-tone-serialism-chords-guitar
alban-berg-diatonic-12-tone-serialism-chords-guitar
alban-berg-diatonic-12-tone-serialism-tri-chords

Finally, here we see a snippet from Berg’s “Lyric Suite”.

alban-berg-lyric-suite

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