How I torment myself. I've read a couple of books already this morning at the library: (1) Gordon Delamont's Modern Twelve-Tone Technique and (2) George Perle's Serial Composition and Atonality. And, just to fill my cup of bitterness to the brim, I've checked out Berg's so-famous (Elegy for a Dip-Shit Dying Young) "violin concerto," and Schoenberg's endlessly touted "variations for orchestra," and I'm going to take them home and listen to them just as long as can stand them; bearing in mind with appalled incredulity Ethan Mordden's and others' lavish, drooling praise of these works' "emotional beauty and exquisite musicality." I'm prepared to barf. Quote, of perfectly sober, unintentional hilariousness, from Modern Twelve-Tone Technique: "Although the structure of the row is largely a matter of personal choice, there are some points worth noting: 1. Serial music is, by its nature, atonal rather than tonal. That is to say it is not related to standard major and minor scales, and has no central tonic. As a general rule, then, it is wise, when constucting the row, to avoid situations which tend to be traditionally tonal in implication.*  Therefore: a. Avoid arpeggiated major or minor triads, or at least avoid over-using them...Although if the 'key suggestion' of a triad movement is contradicted by the note or notes immediately preceding and immediately following the triad, the key suggestion [no longer in quotes] will be less obvious [my italics]. b. Avoid classically resolved tritones, or other movements that have tonal cadential implications...c. Avoid the tonal suggestion that could arise from too obvious a use of diatonic scale or intervallic patterns [again, my italics]. The above points which are aimed at avoiding a tonal sense in the row, are generally valid [!?]. It should be pointed out, however, that a row which has mild sense of tonality is not necessarily wrong [!]...4. The row can be composed with a particular psychological association in mind, depending on the nature of the proposed composition; e.g., a row can have an open and strong quality due to the use of strong interval leaps, such as 5ths and 4ths..or a row can be subdued and introspective due to the use of interval leaps such as minor 6ths, minor 3rds, and some stepwise motion...."

*But of course, as I understand it, this is precisely what Berg did not do in his much appreciated violin concerto, and throughout the score of Lulu--making, in fact, quite a point of the ambivalence of tonality/atonality, and almost never using the Schoenbergian doctrinaire invariable tone-row in a way that Schoenberg could have approved.  It appears that there are depths of horseshit in the theory and practise of dodecaphony quite similar in bottomless, humorless feculence to the preposterous poop of Freudianism, Social Constructionism, and Postmodernism.  Perfect family likenesses in fact.