Tone Row - Nonstandard Tone Rows

Nonstandard Tone Rows

Schoenberg specified many strict rules and desirable guidelines for the construction of tone rows such as number of notes and intervals to avoid. Tone rows which depart from these guidelines include the above tone row from Berg's Violin Concerto which contains triads and tonal emphasis, and the tone row below from Luciano Berio's Nones which contains a repeated note making it a 'thirteen-tone row':

Stravinsky used a five-tone row, chromatically filling out the space of a major third centered tonally on C (C-E), in one of his early serial compositions, In memoriam Dylan Thomas.

In his twelve-tone practice Stravinsky preferred the inverse-retrograde (IR) to the retrograde-inverse (RI), as for example in his Requiem Canticles:

Ben Johnston uses a just tone row (see just intonation) in works including String Quartet No. 6 and 7. Each permutation contains a just chromatic scale, however, transformations (transposition and inversion) produce pitches outside of the primary row form, as already occurs in the inversion of P0. The pitches of each hexachord are drawn from different otonality or utonality on A+ utonality, C otonality and utonality, and E♭- otonality, outlining a diminished triad.