126 Sight Singing Instructions

Twelve-Tone Rows

The top line shows two 12-tone rows from the sixth movement of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite. Study the rows, noticing the upper and lower “lines” of the first row (i.e. the notes with upwards stems vs. the notes with downwards stems).

Sing your way through the tone-rows intervallically as shown. Some of the notes have been enharmonically respelled for ease of singing.

You may not yet be familiar with the twelve-tone and serial yet surprisingly Romantic style of Berg’s music, so please listen to the track at the linked playlist below. For best understanding, listen to the other movements too. For extra inspiration, read about the intriguing musicological detective story that led to the discovery of the forbidden love affair encoded within the tone-rows of the Lyric Suite.

Download the score of Berg’s Lyric Suite

Recording of Berg’s Lyric Suite

You’ll hear the two rows we’re studying quite clearly in the cello and viola pizzicato at the beginning. If you follow carefully, you’ll hear the intervallic relations from the row as Berg transforms it using inversion, retrograde, and so on.

In this warm-up, we will sing through the rows interval by interval. By now, you’ve practiced so much interval singing that you should be able to sing any ascending or descending interval with ease. When singing this kind of non-diatonic music, you may feel free to enharmonically respell notes to make the intervals seem easier.

Melodies by Composers of the Second Viennese School

This week’s melodic examples should all be sung on “la,” because moveable-do solfege is of no relevance in atonal music. If you find it difficult to get from note to note, break the excerpts down into manageable intervallic exercises like those in the warm-up.

You may be unfamiliar with the soundscape of the Second Viennese School composers, Arnold Schoenberg and his two foremost students, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. The following playlist presents a few of these composers’ best-known works. Some are 12-tone serial compositions, while others are freely atonal without being systematically serial.

Twelve-Tone Serial and Atonal Compositions Playlist