Twelve-tone technique The twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and (in British usage) twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition devised by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) and associated with the "Second Viennese School" composers, who were the primary users of the technique in the first decades of its existence. The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a piece of music while preventing the emphasis of any one note through the use of tone rows, orderings of the 12 pitch classes. All 12
music need not be—several pieces by Berg, for instance, have tonal elements. One of the best known twelve-note compositions is "Variations for Orchestra" by Arnold Schoenberg. "Quiet", in Leonard Bernstein's "Candide", satirizes the method by using it for a song about boredom, and Benjamin Britten used a twelve-tone row—a "tema seriale con fuga"—in his "Cantata Academica: Carmen Basiliense" (1959) as an emblem of academicism. Ten features of Schoenberg's mature twelve-tone practice are characteristic, interdependent, and interactive: Twelve-tone technique The twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and (in British usage) twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition devised by Austrian
notes are thus given more or less equal importance, and the music avoids being in a key. Over time, the technique increased greatly in popularity and eventually became widely influential on 20th-century composers. Many important composers who had originally not subscribed to or even actively opposed the technique, such as Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky, eventually adopted it in their music. Schoenberg himself described the system as a "Method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another". It is commonly considered a form of serialism. Schoenberg's countryman and contemporary Josef Matthias Hauer also developed a similar
system using unordered hexachords or "tropes"—but with no connection to Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. Other composers have created systematic use of the chromatic scale, but Schoenberg's method is considered to be historically and aesthetically most significant. Invented by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg in 1921 and first described privately to his associates in 1923, the method was used during the next twenty years almost exclusively by the composers of the Second Viennese School—Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler and Schoenberg himself. The twelve tone technique was preceded by "freely" atonal pieces of 1908–1923 which, though "free", often have as an "integrative element
notes making twelve five-note phrases. Schoenberg's idea in developing the technique was for it to "replace those structural differentiations provided formerly by tonal harmonies". As such, twelve-tone music is usually atonal, and treats each of the 12 semitones of the chromatic scale with equal importance, as opposed to earlier classical music which had treated some notes as more important than others (particularly the tonic and the dominant note). The technique became widely used by the fifties, taken up by composers such as Milton Babbitt, Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Dallapiccola, Ernst Krenek, Riccardo Malipiero, and, after Schoenberg's death, Igor Stravinsky.
Who abandoned traditional harmony and created the twelve-tone system for composition?

Reference answer:
Arnold Schoenberg