The Twelve Days of Christmas, composed as a 12-tone masterpiece

4 January 2019, 17:17

By Kyle Macdonald

There are a dozen days between Christmas and Epiphany and there are 12 tones in the serialism method of composition. One music geek knew what to do.

As we near the end of the Christmas season, let's indulge our inner music geek one last time.

Twelve-note composition is a method of musical writing devised by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg in the early 20th-century. In a piece composed in this style, all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as each other. This means the resulting music can be quite dissonant and does not have the same feeling of harmonic 'home' as other compositions.

'Serialism' as twelve-note composition is often called, was also championed by composers like Alban Berg, Anton Webern and John Cage.

This piece is by star music geek Richard McQuillan and includes the unaltered melody above a twelve-tone accompaniment. The accompaniment accommodates every note equally and provides some very juicy and dissonant harmonic twists and turns. You can watch more of his creations on his YouTube channel.

Great work, Richard. Five Golden Rings for you.