Twelve-tone music

Twelve-tone music, or serial music, type of music developed in the 1920s that rejects tonality as the basis for composition. Its most famous exponent, Arnold Schoenberg, laid down a method of composition that attempted to free music from the 8-note octave and its associated conventions. Twelve-tone compositions are constructed around a specific series of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale. Later 20th-century composers have used the twelve-tone construction with greater freedom. Composers of twelve-tone music include Igor Stravinsky, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, Ernst Krenek, Domitry Shostakovich, and Schoenberg's pupils Anton von Webern and Alban Berg.