I have a fondness for 12-tone (not necessarily serial) composition, and there are several such pieces scattered throughout my discography. I don't follow a strict academic approach (the historical arguments for and against Schoenberg's techniques and "rules" have always seemed childish and non-productive to me). For me, given my interest in improvisation and non-rigid tonal/harmonic structures, the unique characteristics of composing from a tone row allow greater focus on gesture and sequence, as opposed to "correct" voice leading or harmonic structure. In other words, tone rows are one way to avoid getting bogged down with questions of tonal coherence and note/pitch choice; the notes simply ARE and one can focus on how to best express them.
A list:
Variations on a Tone-row
Piano Music Volume 1
Scenes from a Row
Haiku for the Seasons
Sym12 (#4 from 5 Little Pieces for Piano)
Album of Death
No More Daisies Down
NCLASP Vol. 2
Sonatina for violin and piano
I don't want to go into minute detail, but i do want to generalize how they relate to each other.
No More Daisies Down, Sonatina, and Sym12 all use the same row (57t0123468e) in various forms. Sonatina uses Sym12 as it primary section. Daisies is the first (but not the last) truly improvised piece based on a row. Each of the other pieces uses its own row in various creative and non-standard ways. I was known to use them in teaching analysis to show students how to recognize when a particular analytical procedure/system stops working and requires a different approach, but does not invalidate the original analysis (i.e. the "rules" can change without warning as a feature of the piece).
Some day i will find a simple way to make scores available without having to invest in costly self publishing or data storage.
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