Wind Quintet, op. 26 - Twelve-tone slide rule

At the beginning of the 1920s Arnold Schönberg revolutionized the existing rules of Western music with his “Method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another.” With the twelve-tone method, a visionary plan for a future musical order, he laid the twentieth century’s decisive foundation for the emancipation of traditional hierarchical principles of organization. “This method consists primarily of the constant and exclusive use of a set of twelve different tones. This means, of course, that no tone is repeated within the series and that it uses all twelve tones of the chromatic scale, though in a different order [...] The association of tones into harmonies and their succession is regulated [...] by the order of these tones. The basic set functions in the manner of a motive. This explains why such a basic set has to be invented anew for every piece.” (Schönberg: Composition With Twelve Tones, 1941). In the Wind Quintet, op. 26, one of the earliest works to use the new compositional method, Schönberg bases all four movements on a common twelve-tone row.