ABSTRACT
The central meaning of the word “tone” is obviously pitch. The critics in question seem to have overlooked one important detail, namely, that the Arnold Schoenbergian tone-row does in fact offer in itself the necessary and sufficient basis for pitch and time correlation. Returning to the problem of correlating pitch and time on the basis of a given twelve-tone series, what it amounts to is reducing the set of pitch-values to number or, more exactly, to a set of proportional magnitudes which, in turn, can be translated into a series of time values according to any chosen scale. The way Schoenberg uses the series in composition also shows that he never envisaged it as anything but a principle of pitch-organization. In scientific usage, as pure or sine tone, it is uniquely defined by pitch, ie by one single frequency rate. In short, Schoenberg did not attempt to correlate pitch-structure and time-structure.
