Trio for Strings No.4

Well, when you write in a serial environment, it seems there is a reasonable temptation to produce works in twelve movements: one for each note in the tone row. This has an added advantage for the composer: to keep the length of the piece from becoming totally unwieldy, the movements need to be relatively brief - 2-3 minutes at most - so there is no very exhaustive intellectual labor involved in struggling to vary the thematic material through extended movements. Call it the lazy man's form; although frankly the constant labor of inventing new themes for each movement is no work for a slouch, either. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, I suppose...

C-D-F-G-B-A-Db-Eb-Bb-Ab-Gb-E.