twelve-tone system

Thesaurus

Noun

1.

twelve-tone system - a type of serial music introduced by Arnold Schoenberg; uses a tone row formed by the twelve semitones of the chromatic scale (and inverted or backward versions of the row)12-tone music, 12-tone system, twelve-tone musicserial music, serialism - 20th century music that uses a definite order of notes as a thematic basis for a musical composition