Derivation (music)

The term "partition" is also French for the sheet music of a transcription.

In music using the twelve-tone technique, derivation is the construction of a row through segments. A derived row is a tone row whose entirety of twelve tones is constructed from a segment or portion of the whole, the generator. Anton Webern often used derived rows in his pieces. A partition is a segment created from a set through partitioning.

Rows may be derived from a sub-set of any number of pitch classes that is a divisor of 12, the most common being the first three pitches or a trichord. This segment may then undergo transposition, inversion, retrograde, or any combination to produce the other parts of the row (in this case, the other three segments).

One of the side effects of derived rows is invariance. For example, since a segment may be equivalent to the generating segment inverted and transposed, say, 6 semitones, when the entire row is inverted and transposed six semitones the generating segment will now consist of the pitch classes of the derived segment.

Here is a row derived from a trichord taken from Webern's Concerto, Op. 24:

B, B♭, D, E♭, G, F♯, G♯, E, F, C, C♯, A

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