Twelve-tone rules arose from composers’ defensive experience, not pure compositional freedom.

Evidence

For a moment, however, the utopia of a form of music emancipated from conventions and traditions, and open towards what was distinct from humanity, seemed to have become reality. Free atonality', free composition’, the spontaneity of the critical ear' had originally stood at the conclusion of the process of purifying music from convention. There is probably not a single rule in twelve-tone music which is not produced of necessity from composers’ experience, from the progressive elucidation of the natural material of music. But the character of such experience was that of defence’ (the text of Philosophie der neuen Musik adds `by virtue of its subjective sensibility’): that not a single tone should repeat itself, before the music had taken up all of the others; that not a single note should appear which does not have the function of a motif in the construction of the whole; that no harmony should be used which does not clearly justify itself at that point. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 327

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the earlier material on Schoenberg and Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music; the reader already has context that Adorno read Schoenberg’s revolution as allied with Freud and Kraus. — connects to: Younger artists can treat a predecessor genre as playable style, not sacred inheritance. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1253
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Younger artists can treat a predecessor genre as playable style, not sacred inheritance. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1253