Working with Twelve-Tone rows

• Feb 3, 2020 - 21:36

Hey guys, I wonder if there's a plugin or a functionality that allows for creation of random rows and, most importantly, automatic inversions and "retrogradation" (is that a word?).
I've searched for a plugin like this and it doesn't seem to exist as of now, although I believe it would be kinda easy to write (but I admittedly know next to nothing about programming).

If you know of any third party software that accomplishes this, feel free to suggest it, I wouldn't mind transcribing it back to Musescore as much as I'd mind having to calculate retrograde rows by myself.


Comments

I have used online calculators* that will derive the inversion, retrograde, and retrograde-inversion (RI) sequence of an original 12 tone row (prime row), but you must manually input your own derived prime sequence (row). I just posted a question on this forum asking if an inversion plug-in has been created to augment the existing MuseScore "newretrograde" plug-in; then one can apply one to the other for the RI sequence.
Search keyword "12 tone matrix calculators" or "serial music calculators".

Probably someone could write a plugin indeed. There is this one https://musescore.org/en/project/music-serializer but it's rather more specialized. Also probably someone has written a music21 program to do this, and you could simply take the MusicXML output of that and load into MuseScore.

The inversion and retrograde parts do already exist as plugins though, see https://musescore.org/en/project/mirror-intervals and https://musescore.org/en/project/new-retrograde

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