Editing Atonality (section)

===Free atonality===
The twelve-tone technique was preceded by Schoenberg's freely atonal pieces of 1908 to 1923, which, though free, often have as an "integrative element...a minute intervallic [[cell (music)|cell]]" that in addition to expansion may be transformed as with a tone row, and in which individual notes may "function as pivotal elements, to permit overlapping statements of a basic cell or the linking of two or more basic cells".{{sfn|Perle|1977|p=2}} The decay of the sense of tonality and the subsequent distribution into individual elements brought three concepts into play:  1. Musical elements that had since been secondary to tonal form groups now became autonomous.  2. The absence of tonal coherence prompted the search for a unity that could connect the disjointed musical language in an alternative way.  3. Due to the replacement of diatonic principles, new concepts of form arose.<ref>{{Cite book |last=De Leeuw |first=Ton |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46n27q |title=Music of the Twentieth Century: A Study of Its Elements and Structure |date=2005 |publisher=Amsterdam University Press |isbn=978-90-5356-765-4 |jstor=j.ctt46n27q }}</ref>

The twelve-tone technique was also preceded by nondodecaphonic serial composition used independently in the works of Alexander Scriabin, Igor Stravinsky, [[Béla Bartók]], [[Carl Ruggles]], and others.{{sfn|Perle|1977|p=37}} "Essentially, Schoenberg and Hauer systematized and defined for their own dodecaphonic purposes a pervasive technical feature of 'modern' musical practice, the [[ostinato]]."{{sfn|Perle|1977|p=37}}