Twelve Ton Rose was created in 1996 by the Trisha Brown Dance Company. The piece is inspired and constructed around the music of Anton Webern and features extracts from several opuses for strings that disrupt the movement, creating a surprising choreography that dives into the affinity between the american choreographer and the Austrian composer.

« Twelve Ton Rose (1996) is the second work in Brown’s music cycle, set to Anton Webern’s Opus 5, Opus 7, and Opus 28. The title is a whimsical play on twelve tone rows, a compositional device developed by Arnold Schoenberg and used extensively by Webern. A series of lush ensemble pieces, duets, and solos, the choreography has a deliberate yet poetic relation to the musical structures. Brown and her company, like Webern, exhibited a profound interest in redefining contrapuntal expressions.

Brown noted how the music dissolved in and out and used that as inspiration in her choreography, at times filling the silences and enlivening stillnesses. In most prior works for the proscenium, the company would generate a large body of phrase work “belonging” to each piece to be used as fodder throughout the entirety of the work.

In Twelve Ton Rose, the center sections alone feature movement lines singular to the work. Other materials are drawn from throughout Browns vast repertory and re-framed, multiplied, layered, collided, stretched and condensed; the resulting choreography reflecting Webern’s tendency away from strong tonal centrism and towards abstraction and lyricism. »

Kathleen Fisher